The BrahMos Missile Was First Fired on 12 June 2001, Cruises at About Mach 2.8 Over a Stated 290 km, Is Built for Ships, Land Launchers, Aircraft and Submarines, and Now Has Export Contracts in Three Countries

India and Russia signed the agreement that created BrahMos in Moscow on 12 February 1998, and the first BrahMos was fired from a launcher off Chandipur, Odisha, on 12 June 2001. What came out of that joint venture is a two-stage supersonic cruise missile that its makers say cruises at about Mach 2.8 (nearly three times the speed of sound) and reaches up to 290 km. BrahMos Aerospace lists it as in service with the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force.

BrahMos Aerospace calls it India’s first full-scale weapon to receive an export contract. The Philippines signed in January 2022, and by July 2026 Vietnam and Indonesia had signed as well.

A 1998 agreement signed in Moscow

The company’s own history begins with the Gulf War. After that conflict in the early 1990s, it says, India felt a growing need for a cruise missile system for its armed forces, and its long friendship with Russia supplied the route. On 12 February 1998 A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, then Secretary of the Department of Defence Research and Development, signed an inter-governmental agreement in Moscow for India. N.V. Mikhailov, Russia’s first Deputy Defence Minister, signed for Russia.

The agreement led to BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture between India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyenia, usually shortened to NPOM. The name joins the Brahmaputra and the Moskva rivers. India holds 50.5 percent of the venture and Russia 49.5 percent, according to the company. The two governments agreed on 7 February 2014 to extend the agreement for an indefinite period.

What each side brought

The company lays out the split plainly. DRDO had already built inertial navigation systems (which steer a missile by measuring its own motion), mission software, and mobile launchers for the Prithvi and Agni missiles. NPOM had expertise in ramjet engines, along with technologies from space systems, launch vehicles and cruise missiles.

A ramjet burns fuel in air that the missile’s own speed squeezes into the engine, so it needs a booster to get going. BrahMos Aerospace describes exactly that design. A solid-propellant booster takes the missile to supersonic speed and then drops away, and a liquid-fuelled ramjet carries it onward at close to Mach 2.8.

Pillai and the first launch

The venture’s founding chief executive and managing director was A. Sivathanu Pillai. BrahMos Aerospace’s profile says he joined DRDO in 1986 and became programme director of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) under Kalam, the programme sanctioned in 1983 to build a range of missiles inside India. It adds that he had earlier been a core team member on the SLV-3 satellite launcher project at ISRO, and that he evolved the concept of the BrahMos joint venture. A company release of 12 June 2023 styles him Padma Bhushan Dr A.S. Pillai.

The first successful launch came on 12 June 2001. The missile was fired from a stationary vertical launcher off the Chandipur coast in Odisha. According to the company history, the venture then began to appear at defence exhibitions, and BrahMos was shown at the MAKS air show in Moscow in 2001, its first international display.

Speaking at a company event on 12 June 2023, the 22nd anniversary of that launch, Pillai described the venture’s approach this way, in the company’s report of his words: “We never said ‘No’ to any challenge.”

The numbers the makers publish

On its missile page, BrahMos Aerospace gives the standard missile a cruise speed of close to 2.8 Mach and a flight range of up to 290 km, supersonic all the way. It carries a conventional warhead of up to 200 kg. The missile can cruise at up to 15 km altitude and come in as low as 5 metres at the end of its flight. It works on a “fire and forget” principle, meaning it guides itself after launch and needs no operator to steer it.

The company compares the missile with subsonic cruise missiles and claims three times the velocity, 2.5 to 3 times the range and nine times the kinetic energy. These are the manufacturer’s figures. The page also says the missile has an identical configuration for land, sea and sub-sea platforms and is stored and launched from a canister that doubles as the launch tube.

One missile, four ways to launch it

The Navy has deployed BrahMos since 2005, according to the company. Its ship-based page describes the missile as the “prime strike weapon” on Indian destroyers and frigates, fired from either a vertical or an inclined launcher, and says salvos can go out in quick succession on different trajectories.

On land, ANI reported in April 2024 that the Indian Army has had multiple BrahMos regiments in its arsenal since 2007.

The air-launched version was built for the Air Force’s Sukhoi-30MKI fighter. The company says the airborne launcher cleared for integration in 2016 was designed and developed in India, that a modified Su-30MKI was handed over by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited at Aero India 2015, and that the first demonstration flight with the launcher took place on 25 June 2016. The first live firing from the fighter was on 22 November 2017 against a sea target in the Bay of Bengal. The missile was dropped from the fuselage, and its engines then lit. The company adds that firings in 2019 validated land-attack and anti-ship strikes from long stand-off distances, and calls it the heaviest and most powerful weapon to arm the Su-30.

For submarines, the company reports a test on 20 March 2013, when a BrahMos variant lifted vertically from a submerged platform off Visakhapatnam and flew its full 290 km. It says that firing validated the missile’s readiness for fitment in submarines.

Longer range: the extended-range tests

On 11 March 2017 an extended-range BrahMos was fired from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur, from a mobile autonomous launcher, the road vehicle that carries and fires the land version. The company’s release said the missile met its mission parameters and showed a range much higher than 290 km at a speed of 2.8 Mach. Sudhir Mishra, then the company’s CEO and managing director, said the forces could now “knock down enemy targets far beyond the 400 kms.” The release credits India’s full membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime, a group of countries that restrict missile exports, with removing the cap on BrahMos’s range.

The Defence Ministry reported two more extended-range firings in 2022. On 5 March the destroyer INS Chennai fired an extended-range land-attack BrahMos, and the ministry said it hit its intended target with pinpoint accuracy after an extended-range trajectory and complex manoeuvres. On 12 May the Air Force made the first launch of the extended-range version from a Su-30MKI and the missile hit its designated target in the Bay of Bengal. Neither release gives a range figure, so the ministry’s official range for the longer version remains unpublished.

The programme has had a setback on record as well. On 14 July 2021 the CSIS Missile Threat project reported that an extended-range BrahMos fired on 12 July failed shortly after launch, and that defence industry sources pointed to a propulsion malfunction. The report cites the Economic Times and Shephard News and carries no official statement.

Orders at home

On 1 March 2024 the Defence Ministry signed a contract worth ₹19,518.65 crore with BrahMos Aerospace for BrahMos missiles for the Navy’s combat and training needs, PTI reported. A separate ₹988 crore contract covered the ship-borne system. Both were among five contracts worth ₹39,125 crore signed that day.

DRDO flew a separate cruise missile, the Long Range Land Attack Cruise Missile, on 15 June 2026, and that flight is covered in our account of DRDO’s 2026 test series, and the wider story of Indian-built weapons and their sales abroad is in our piece on India’s defence industry.

The first export, then Vietnam and Indonesia

BrahMos Aerospace signed a contract with the Philippines’ Department of National Defense on 28 January 2022 for a shore-based anti-ship missile system. The Press Information Bureau’s statement called the contract an “important step forward for Government of India’s policy of promoting responsible defence exports.” ANI later put the deal at $375 million and said it covers three batteries, the launcher-and-missile units that guard a stretch of coast.

The first missiles arrived on 19 April 2024, flown out by an Indian Air Force C-17 transport aircraft to the Philippine Marine Corps, ANI reported. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported on 23 April 2025 that a second batch had been sent by sea.

On 30 May 2026 India’s Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh told the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that India had signed a deal to supply BrahMos to Vietnam and was in the final stages of a similar deal with Indonesia, Reuters reported. Singh gave no figures. Reuters had earlier reported, citing a source, that the Vietnam deal could be worth about 60 billion rupees ($629 million) including training and logistics support. That value has not been officially confirmed.

On 7 July 2026 Indonesia’s presidential palace announced that Indonesia’s defence ministry had signed a BrahMos contract, after talks in Jakarta between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Prabowo Subianto. The announcement gave no value. Reuters, citing an Indian government official, reported that India would also supply the Astra air-to-air missile.