Getting Vikram-1 to orbit: Inside Skyroot Aerospace's coming bid to make spaceflight history
Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket is seen inside the company's Infinity Campus in Hyderabad, India. (Image credit: Sumil Sudhakaran/Skyroot Aerospace)
HYDERABAD, India — When Space.com visited Skyroot Aerospace's Max-Q campus here in February, the company's first orbital rocket, Vikram-1, was still coming together.Inside the company's 55,000-square-foot (5,110 square meters) rocket factory, engineers sat before computer screens, running critical simulations and systems checks on Vikram-1's Orbit Adjustment Module, the liquid-fueled upper stage that stands at the center of the room and will guide the rocket's final maneuvers in space. Unlike the rocket's three solid-fueled lower stages, the upper stage can restart its engine, allowing Vikram-1 to deploy multiple customer satellites into different orbits during a single mission.At the time, it was one of the last major components awaiting an overnight transport to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where the rocket's lower stages had already arrived for final integration.
Aerial view of Skyroot Aerospace's Infinity Campus in Hyderabad, India, showing a life-size model of the company's Vikram-1 rocket outside. (Image credit: Sumil Sudhakaran/Skyroot Aerospace)Five months later, the fully assembled, seven-story rocket stands on the coastal launch pad, monitored by a launch team of about 200 people — roughly one-fifth of Skyroot's workforce — preparing for a launch window that opens on July 12.If all goes as planned, Vikram-1's mission, named Aagaman — Sanskrit for "arrival" — will place multiple customer payloads into low Earth orbit, at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). Success would be historic: No private Indian company has ever launched a satellite to orbit.The manifest includes Skyroot's SCOPE satellite; a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; Indian startup Grahaa Space's SOLARAS S3 satellite; and Embrace, a robotic arm designed to capture debris in orbit, from fellow Indian company Cosmoserve Space.Vikram-1 will also carry two symbolic payloads — a floral-shaped artwork called Cosmic Bloom from the lab-grown-jewelry company Cosmos Diamonds, and a miniature 18-karat gold rocket by artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada that honors Indian scientific pioneers Vikram Sarabhai (after whom the Vikram rocket series is named), C.V. Raman and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.A successful mission would also move Skyroot closer to its goal of offering dedicated launches for small satellites that require precise orbital destinations. Rather than flying as secondary payloads aboard larger rockets, customers would be able to purchase missions tailored to their own orbital requirements — a model most successfully employed these days by the California-based company Rocket Lab.Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana likens the strategy to booking a cab rather than taking a train."The 'cab' market is what we want to put our mark on with the Vikram series," Chandana told Space.com. "There are very few opportunities for customers to reach customized orbits today."Aagaman is the first of three planned development flights intended to validate Vikram-1 before Skyroot begins commercial operations. If the vehicle performs as expected, the company hopes to scale production to one orbital rocket a month from its two Hyderabad campuses, according to Chandana."The whole idea is to go there as prepared as possible and to attain as much data as possible from the launch, so that we can get to fast-paced, high-frequency launches as soon as possible," he said.Skyroot first drew headlines in 2022, when its Vikram-S vehicle became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach space.The vehicle was a suborbital technology demonstrator, climbing to an altitude of roughly 54 miles (88 km) before falling back to Earth. (That's above the boundary of space according to some, but not all, metrics.) According to Chandana, about 80% of the technologies now flying on Vikram-1 — includi
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