India Let Private Companies Into Space. Look What They Built.

On the morning of 18 November 2022, a six-metre rocket the colour of carbon fibre stood on a pad at Sriharikota, on India’s east coast. It was not built by the Indian Space Research Organisation. It was built by a company that, four years earlier, had not existed — founded by two engineers who quit their jobs to build rockets.

At 11:30 in the morning, it lit its engine and climbed to about 89.5 kilometres before falling back into the Bay of Bengal. It carried no astronauts and reached no orbit. But it was the first rocket ever launched from Indian soil that a private company had designed and built. For a country whose space programme had been a government monopoly for half a century, that small suborbital hop was a door swinging open.

Fifty years of one name

For most of its history, “space” in India meant ISRO and nothing else. Founded in 1969, the agency built India’s satellites, launched them on its own rockets, sent a probe to Mars on a famously tight budget, and put a lander near the Moon’s south pole in 2023. It is one of the most admired space agencies in the world. But it was, functionally, the only game in town. If you were a young engineer in India who wanted to build a rocket, you had exactly one employer.

That changed in 2020. Facing an economy shaken by the pandemic, the government announced a sweeping set of reforms and, among them, decided to open the space sector to private companies. The idea was simple and overdue: let startups build rockets and satellites, let them use ISRO’s launch pads and test facilities, and stop treating space as a state secret.

The two agencies that made it possible

Opening a sector isn’t the same as writing a press release. Someone has to let a private company onto a government launch range, sign off on its rocket, and share decades of hard-won engineering. So the reforms created new machinery.

The key body is IN-SPACe — the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre — approved by the Cabinet in June 2020 and given a headquarters in Ahmedabad. Think of it as a single-window regulator and promoter rolled into one: it authorises private space activity, hand-holds startups through the rules, and brokers access to ISRO’s infrastructure. Alongside it sits NSIL (NewSpace India Limited), the commercial arm of the Department of Space, whose job is to take technology ISRO already developed and license it out to industry.

The effect was immediate. Within a couple of years, IN-SPACe had fielded dozens of proposals from startups. India, which had almost no private space industry to speak of, suddenly had one of the largest counts of space startups in the world. Here are the companies that turned the policy into hardware.

Skyroot: the rocket from a rented shed

The company behind that 2022 launch is Skyroot Aerospace, founded in Hyderabad in 2018 by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, two former ISRO engineers. Their maiden rocket, Vikram-S — named for Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space programme — flew a mission fittingly called Prarambh, Sanskrit for “the beginning.”

Vikram-S was a suborbital test: a single-stage, solid-fuel rocket that went up and came back down, carrying three small customer payloads. It didn’t reach orbit, and it wasn’t meant to. It was a proving flight — a way to test the avionics, the structure, and the team before the real target.

That target is Vikram-1, a full orbital launch vehicle designed to carry satellites into space for paying customers. As of mid-2026, Skyroot had announced a launch window for its first orbital attempt, Mission Aagaman — but that flight had not yet happened at the time of writing, and orbit is a far harder thing than a suborbital hop. It’s worth being precise about this: Skyroot has flown a suborbital rocket, and announced an orbital one. Along the way the company became India’s first space-tech “unicorn,” valued at over a billion dollars, on the strength of what it’s promising as much as what it’s flown.

Agnikul: the engine that comes out of a printer

If Skyroot’s story is about being first, Agnikul Cosmos is about doing something genuinely new. The Chennai startup, incubated at IIT Madras, launched its own suborbital demonstrator — Agnibaan SOrTeD (Sub-Orbital Technology Demonstrator) — on 30 May 2024, from a private launch pad it built at Sriharikota and named Dhanush.

What made that flight matter was the engine. Traditional rocket engines are assembled from hundreds of separately machined and welded parts — every joint a place where things can leak, crack, or fail. Agnikul’s engine, the Agnilet, is instead 3D-printed as a single piece of a nickel alloy called Inconel. No assembly, no welds — the whole combustion chamber and its plumbing grown layer by layer from metal powder. Agnikul describes it as the world’s first single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine, and the appeal is speed: an engine that can be printed in days rather than machined over months.

The flight was also India’s first with a semi-cryogenic engine — one that burns refined kerosene with liquid oxygen, a cleaner and easier-to-handle combination than the super-cold liquid hydrogen used in fully cryogenic engines. Two suborbital flights, from two young companies, in eighteen months: the private sector had gone from zero to a genuine race.

Pixxel: satellites that see colours we can’t

Not every space startup builds rockets. The quieter revolution is in what flies on top of them — the satellites. And here India’s standout is Pixxel, founded in 2019 by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, who started sketching the idea as students at BITS Pilani.

Pixxel builds hyperspectral imaging satellites, and the word is worth unpacking. An ordinary camera — and most Earth-observation satellites — sees in a handful of broad colour bands: roughly red, green, blue, maybe a couple of infrared. A hyperspectral sensor slices the light into hundreds of narrow bands. That fine-grained spectrum is effectively a chemical fingerprint. It can distinguish a healthy crop from a stressed one before the damage is visible, spot a methane leak from a pipeline, flag the mineral signature of an ore body, or measure the health of a coral reef — all from orbit.

Pixxel calls its constellation Firefly. The first three satellites went up on a SpaceX rideshare in January 2025, and three more followed later that year, giving the company six operational satellites. Pixxel says they resolve detail down to about five metres per pixel across more than 150 spectral bands — sharper than the roughly 30-metre resolution that had been standard for hyperspectral imaging. In 2024, NASA selected Pixxel as one of the commercial vendors it will buy Earth-observation data from, a notable vote of confidence for a startup barely five years old.

The layer nobody sees: tracking the traffic

As orbit fills with satellites, someone has to keep track of the crowd. Two more Indian startups work this less glamorous but essential frontier. Digantara, based in Bengaluru, launched a satellite called SCOT — Space Camera for Object Tracking — in January 2025, built to watch other objects in orbit from orbit, mapping debris and traffic in a way ground-based radar can’t. Dhruva Space, in Hyderabad, builds the satellite “buses” — the standard body-and-power platforms that carry someone else’s instruments — and runs ground stations as a service. Both were among the first companies formally authorised by IN-SPACe. The ecosystem, in other words, is starting to have layers: launchers, imagers, and the plumbing in between.

ISRO didn’t sit still

Opening the sector didn’t mean ISRO stepped back — it kept chasing the hardest prize in the business: reusability. Between 2023 and 2024 the agency ran a series of experiments with a winged vehicle nicknamed Pushpak. In the most striking test, in June 2024, a helicopter carried Pushpak to 4.5 kilometres, released it several hundred metres off to the side of a runway, and let it fly itself down — correcting its own path and touching down on the runway autonomously, like a spaceplane coming home. It’s a building block toward rockets that land and fly again rather than burning up in the sea, the same economics that reshaped the global launch market.

Early days, honestly

It’s worth keeping the excitement calibrated. These are young companies. The Indian private sector has flown two suborbital rockets, not yet a privately built orbital one. Pixxel’s constellation is real and in orbit, but small. ISRO’s reusable vehicle is still an experiment, not an operational rocket. Most of these firms are burning investor money in pursuit of markets that haven’t fully arrived. Some will not make it.

But that was true of the American NewSpace boom too, in its first few years — before one of those startups started landing rockets on drone ships. The point of opening a sector isn’t that every startup succeeds. It’s that a country stops having a single place where space can happen, and starts having a hundred. Fifty years ago, an Indian engineer with a rocket in their head had one door to knock on. Now there are companies, and pads, and printers, and a regulator whose job is to say yes. The rockets that follow will be built by people who, until very recently, weren’t allowed to build them at all.