BENGALURU – On an island a little off the east coast of Andhra Pradesh, India’s premier rocket launching facility is getting ready for a new milestone. The 55-year-old Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, which sent Indian space missions to the moon and Mars, is set to launch the country’s first privately built orbital rocket.

Built by Skyroot Aerospace, a start-up from Hyderabad, the Vikram-I rocket is a seven-storey-tall, multi-stage orbital launch vehicle designed to carry small satellites into low Earth orbit.

It will be launched any day between July 12 and Aug 4, subject to weather conditions and regulatory approvals.

“The rocket is all stacked on the launchpad,” Skyroot CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana told The Straits Times.

His team is now in Sriharikota, monitoring the weather, checking with other countries for other objects along the trajectory, and testing all parts before lift-off. Some of the vehicle’s technologies were tested using a suborbital rocket launched in 2022 and in several ground tests. This will be the first orbital launch, making it a major milestone for India’s private space sector.

“This is a test flight. We hope to get as much real in-flight data as possible about the rocket in space,” added Chandana.

Named after the late Vikram Sarabhai, who pioneered the Indian space programme, the rocket marks the beginning of India’s inclusion of private developers in its hitherto state-sponsored orbital operations, helmed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for almost 60 years.

If successful, Vikram-I is expected to open the door to a more competitive and globally connected commercial space ecosystem in India.

India’s space programme is one of the world’s oldest, envisioned in the 1960s within a decade of independence, to leapfrog socio-economic development in a populated, low-income country.

It has been globally unique for its resolutely indigenous ecosystem and cost-effectiveness. The development of space applications such as communications, remote sensing, and meteorology, which could provide tangible, practical benefits for Indians, was given priority.

Gradually, India’s programme joined the global space race, shifting towards highly visible space projects. This reorientation was evident in three lunar explorations from 2008 to 2023, and culminated in India becoming the fourth country after the United States, the Soviet Union and China to conduct a soft landing (a controlled descent) on the moon, writes London School of Economics fellow Dimitrios Stroikos in Research for the World.

ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) has launched over 400 foreign commercial satellites for 36 countries, earning US$43 million (S$55.5 million) and €272 million (S$401 million) from 2015 to 2024. Singapore has also used India’s PSLV to launch 20 satellites for earth observation, radar, and research.

India’s space economy is valued at US$8.4 billion, but its share in the global space sector remains at 2 per cent. To expand more quickly, the government opened up the space sector to private players in 2019 and created a National Space Policy in 2023 outlining specific roles for government agencies to spur commercial growth in all space-related activities.

In January 2026, the Minister of State for Science and Technology and Space, Jitendra Singh, said in Parliament that the space sector, which was once marginal in economic terms, is expected to grow four to five times over the next eight to 10 years, potentially reaching US$40 billion to US$45 billion.

Today, there are 400 space tech start-ups in India, with 90 of them having raised about US$869 million in funds.

As India’s youngest space tech unicorn, Skyroot now joins a growing list of private companies worldwide that have independently developed and launched orbital rockets, such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab from the US, and LandSpace from China.

“With the information we get from this launch, we will be able to validate our designs, identify and resolve issues to improve the health of the system for a reliable commercial launch programme. We hope to launch services for customers’ communication or Earth observation satellites soon,” said Chandana.

Vikram-I does not simply “build what is already there, and is innovating new tech”, he told ST.

The entire rocket is built of advanced carbon fibre composite structures, the lightest material for space vehicles. The rocket is also flying with a 3D-printed engine.

The rocket is designed to place up to 350kg into low Earth orbit, about 450km above the surface of the planet.

For its maiden launch, named Aagaman, or arrival in Sanskrit, it will carry on board equipment, or payloads, from domestic and international customers such as Indian tech start-up Cosmoserve Space, whose soft-robotic arm will grab debris or defunct satellites from Earth’s orbit; and motors by German company Dcubed GmbH that will secure and release sensitive equipment during launch.

It will launch into space CubeSats, which are 10cm cube-sized satellites on behalf of various companies. They include SOLARAS, a nanosatellite from Karnataka-based Grahaa Space, which aims to build cost-efficient, scalable nanosatellites to make space-based data more accessible for scientific research, Earth observation, disaster management, agriculture, climate monitoring, and emerging commercial applications, the company said in a statement.

Symbolically, the rocket is also carrying the first diamond in space called Cosmic Bloom, developed by Cosmos Diamonds, and gold rice-grain-sized miniature sculptures of renowned Indian scientists Vikram Sarabhai, Nobel Prize-winning physicist C.V. Raman, and aerospace scientist and former Indian president Abdul Kalam.

To promote the growth of the country’s commercial space sector, the national space agency has offered its test stands and launch infrastructure for use by private companies like Skyroot.

“Getting access to ISRO’s fantastic facilities” has helped to compress the timelines of product development and launches, said Chandana, who was a scientist at ISRO for six years before leaving to start Skyroot.

The company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Naga Bharath Daka, was also a flight computer engineer at ISRO’s rocket centre.

Skyroot raised US$60 million in May in a round that valued the company at US$1.1 billion. Sovereign wealth ?fund GIC and Singapore’s investment company Temasek are among the start-up’s top backers. Skyroot declined to share the exact investment figures.

“Raising capital in the space sector was almost as difficult as developing the complicated technology. There is very little capital in the country for space tech, so it took us seven years to find serious investors who add value,” said Chandana.

He added that Skyroot led the way for various funds in India looking at investing in the space sector, which could help the next generation of start-ups.

In July, Temasek reportedly invested US$100 million in the space imaging firm Pixxel, the second Indian space start-up it is funding after Skyroot.

The Indian government has also set aside 1 trillion rupees (S$13.4 billion) for a new Research, Development, and Innovation Fund to boost private-sector participation in deep tech.