Skyroot Aerospace put its Vikram-1 rocket into low Earth orbit early on Saturday, July 18, making India the third country with a privately built orbital launcher. The other two are the United States and China.
The rocket left the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the barrier island of Sriharikota at 12:05 p.m. India Standard Time (0635 GMT), pushed off the pad by its first-stage solid rocket motor. It held a nominal trajectory and released its payloads on schedule. Seventeen minutes after liftoff, the flight had hit every mark.
“The Vikram-1 Aagaman mission is a grand success,” the mission director told a room that erupted in cheers. A commentator on the company’s webcast put it more broadly: “It is the dawn of a new space era.”
What flew
Aagaman, Sanskrit for “Arrival”, was a test flight. The main aim was to see how the rocket and its systems behaved in the air. Still, it carried customer cargo, set to be deployed at an altitude of 450 kilometers (280 miles).
That cargo included a technology demonstration from the German firm DCUBED, the Solaras S3 nanosatellite pathfinder from the Indian startup Grahaa Space, and Embrace, a robotic arm from Cosmoserve Space designed to grab space debris. Skyroot also flew its own SCOPE satellite, which gathered data on how the rocket performed. Two symbolic items rode along: a small 18-karat gold rocket by the artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada, and “Cosmic Bloom”, made by the jewelry company Cosmos Diamonds, which works with lab-grown gems. All of it reached space.
Vikram-1 is a four-stage, seven-story-tall small-satellite launcher. The company says it can lift about 350 kilograms (770 pounds) to low Earth orbit.
A supply gap
Skyroot is based in Hyderabad and was founded in 2018. In 2022 its Vikram-S suborbital rocket made it the first private Indian company to reach space. Co-founders Pawan Kumar Chandana, the CEO, and Naga Bharath Daka both used to work for the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Chandana laid out the commercial case in an emailed statement on July 16. “The small satellite launch market is deeply constrained on the supply side,” he said. “At the same time, the demand for services enabled by satellites in space will only continue to grow, and that is where Skyroot’s opportunity lies.”
Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (retired), Director General of the Indian Space Association, called the flight “a defining milestone for India’s space journey.” In an emailed statement shortly after the mission, he said Skyroot had “shattered legacy boundaries” and shown that domestic industry “is primed to handle end-to-end space missions.”
