India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

Regarding Indian private space sector, In addition to skyroot solid rocket, following are noteworthy

Agnikul is planning to launch semi-cryo kerosene rocket pretty soon. Their engine is 3d printed and use electric pump fed 25kN small engine. Planning to launch 4 clustered engines as first stage and already did suborbital test, with some parachute splash down reusability claims.

Astrobase is recent entrant. With decent funding and former ISRO scientists as core team, developing 800kN FFCS methalox engine. FFCS is called holy grail of liquid engines. They have acquired largest metal 3d engine and planning VTVL 1st stage reusability

There is just so much that can go wrong with rocket launches if you do cursory reading about these things. A few random examples: The lowest stage cant just be "turned down" or modulated because they work by burning an inner solid rubber lining that's like an annular cylinder. The first three stages are roughly doing the job sequence: `lift off the ground -> reach target altitude -> reach target orbital velocity` and each stage is modulated for atmospheric pressure, gravity. Another limit is you can't really design it for a human in the middle(like a jet plane), so the rocket's computer needs to do everything, and when the rocket's pitch or yaw or roll(in a manner of speaking) go off beyond a nominal range its game over.

ISRO has a very good track record of launching rockets with solid state engines. I do wonder if almost all of their expertise was used for the first three stages(and they are not 3d printed)? And how much more difficult it is to make the last stage as compared to the first three, which as I understand, was the stage designed and tested by skyroot itself(manufactured by Wipro 3D).

And with $160MM in funding at a $1.1B valuation? I don't know about their debt, but to get to LEO in 8 years on that little money is extremely impressive.

Only the third country to achieve this. Kudos.

There's another startup trying reusable rockets.

For those interested, just read a great book on this topic: When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62050244-when-the-heaven...

It profiles: Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab

Extremely strong performance from India’s Skyroot with their Vikram-1 rocket. I can say that many in the space industry are looking for new launch capacity to LEO.

Does anyone know what they're using for telemetry? Over the launch pad you have a UHF link, but that offers infrequent availability after launch.

If I were launching my first orbital vehicle and I didn't have a hyper developed space program already, I would want to equip it with something like Starlink so I would be able to communicate with it even when it wasn't in range of my ground station(s).

Quite the achievement, congratulations! I'm really curious to see how things unfold when tens of private companies can launch payloads into LEO.

That's pretty cool. The phrase "3D-printed engine" stuck out to me as neat, too.

The first, second and third stages all being solid rockets also means India now has a global-range ICBM, with only a little bit of modification needed to make it storable in a silo. Privately developed, but I would be astonished if the Indian military isn't well aware of this new capability.

Fantastic news! Always good to see others manage achieve great things.

India's space work often went under the radar. Im glad they're getting the success and attention they deserve.

A small but bright light in an economy where manufacturing jobs are hard to come by (https://archive.ph/Haj8n).

4 stages feels like a lot of added complexity for your first launch. I assume it gives you more performance margin to drop weight/stages more often?

Congratulations!

India desperately needs more r&d and advanced manufacturing. Good for them; congrats to the team

I have an AI generated podcast that tries to unearth some of the negative spin that develops around these amazing achievements. No surprise there was a spike in misinformation this week and I’m sure there will be more to come.

It can be hard when you are blindsided by negativity that seems to come out of nowhere. Hopefully this is helpful to us all https://rss.com/podcasts/the-narrative-networks-podcast/3017...

btw recently discovered this neat website that shows ALL upcoming rocket launches

* https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/8033/

* https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/

It's so sad that the Modi clique controls India. If India could become a real democracy, it could be competitive in the long run against China, because assuming similar quality and costs, people in democracies would much rather support a democracy than sinomarxist China or crazy-oligarch orange king country. But with Modi in charge, none of that is possible. Old men really need to leave politics, they just cause too many problems in general.

Superpower by 2026 it seems

Vikram-1 is distilled version of Saturn-V