A promising Indian launch startup nears its first orbital test flight

After decades of controlling all aspects of spaceflight, the Indian government decided in 2020 to open things up to private industry. Essentially, the government said, companies could build their own rockets, obtain permission to launch them, and even use state-operated facilities. The government and the country’s space agency, ISRO, instituted this change in response to the rise of commercial space industries in the United States, and later China, that were playing an increasingly important role in global spaceflight. Now, six years later, this structural shift is beginning to bear some fruit. The most promising Indian launch company, Skyroot Aerospace, is nearing the pad with its first orbital rocket. The Vikram-1 launch vehicle could take flight within the next couple of months, its cofounder and chief executive officer, Pawan Kumar Chandana, told Ars in an interview. And with a recent $60 million fundraising round valuing the firm at $1.1 billion, the company is poised to accelerate its commercial launch efforts. The origins of Skyroot Chandana graduated with an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2012, and like almost anyone in India interested in space at the time, he went to work for the Indian Space Agency. But six years later, he could see the coming disruption to the space industry and believed that India would soon follow suit. “Going back to my school days, I always had the ambition to be an entrepreneur,” he said. …