Startup puts India in elite space club

An Indian startup has successfully launched its first rocket into low-Earth orbit, placing the country in an elite club that also includes the US and China.

Hyderabad-based space startup Skyroot Aerospace  launched the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket, Vikram-1 on Saturday, carrying several customer payloads and in-orbit experiments.

The rocket successfully injected its payload into a 450 km orbit after a flight lasting about 17 minutes. The mission’s goals include validating the rocket’s capabilities in-flight and collecting data for future commercial launches, Skyroot said.

“Mission Aagaman is a grand success,” the company said in a statement, using its own name for the project. “This is a test flight. We will be doing a few of these before we move into routine commercial flights,” it added.

The Vikram-1 is about 22 meters (72 feet) tall and designed to carry payloads of up to 350 kg into low-Earth orbit. The launch vehicle used a module powered by a 3D-printed engine, which was used for the first time in India.

Skyroot, founded in 2018, became the first space sector startup in the country to hit a $1 billion valuation earlier this year. It launched the Vikram-S mission in 2022, which became the first privately developed rocket to reach space from Indian soil on a suborbital flight.

New Delhi’s successful private space mission comes amid ‌a flurry of activity ⁠in the global small satellite launch market.

The surge in commercial and defense demands has spurred nations across Europe and Asia to boost support for domestic companies to secure independent access to space missions.

India’s private space ecosystem has flourished since New Delhi opened up the space sector to private investment in 2020, with the number of startups increasing from the single digits in 2019 to over 400 by early 2026.

The sector was opened up to encourage startups to build rockets, satellites and launch services, as India aims to increase its share in the space economy to $44 billion by 2033, from about $8 billion currently.

India has up until now relied on space missions created by the state-backed Indian Space Research Organization. It launched 104 satellites into orbit on one rocket in 2017, a record at the time. It also became the fourth country to pull off a lunar landing, when Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the moon’s south pole in 2023.

Skyroot’s achievement is also expected to boost private investor backing for Indian space startups, which are promising to compete with heavily funded global incumbents, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Global market intelligence platform Tracxn estimates that funding for Indian space startups has increased five-fold since 2020, to $152 million in 2025.

The market is crowded with players in the US, Europe, and China. In June, when Elon Musk-backed SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq, it was valued at about $1.77 trillion.