In 2022, India beat long-time spacefarers Russia to become the 3rd nation to see a privately designed and built rocket successfully reach space.
Now just 4 years later, and the Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace has outdone itself.
The company’s new 4-stage Vikram-1 rocket capable of carrying over 770 lbs. of payload aced its maiden flight to low-Earth orbit.
Lifting off at 12:05 p.m. local time from a launch pad on the barrier island of Sriharikota, Vikram-1 had successfully reached every performance metric by 17 minutes of flight time, leading to mission control announcing a “grand success,” to the roar of the team in the control room.
The company sees Vikram-1 as fulfilling a critical role in the global launch market for satellites and other small deliverables.
“The small satellite launch market is deeply constrained on the supply side,” Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana said in an emailed statement to Space.com on Thursday, July 16th, just 2 days before their successful launch.
“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.”
Fantastically for both shareholders and clients, not only was Vikram-1 a complete success, but the test carried customer satellites, including one from the German company DCUBED, and 1 from each of the Indian space firms Grahaa Space and Cosmoserve Space.
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Of greater interest perhaps to GNN readers, Cosmoserve had paid for the passage of a robotic space drone called Embrace which will float about and use its robotic arm to grab and hurl space debris out of Earth’s orbit.
India is now the 3rd country that has a national route to space, joining the great powers China and the US.
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