Indian private rocket company Skyroot Aerospace conducted its first orbital launch on Saturday. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
The Vikram-1 rocket lifted off from the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) launch facility in Sriharikota, southern India, at 11:30 local time (06:00 GMT). The seven-storey rocket was headed for Low Earth Orbit, 280 miles (450 km) away.
If the 16-minute flight succeeds, Skyroot will become the first Indian private company to launch a rocket into orbit, making India only the third country, after the US and China, with a private company capable of orbital launches.
According to Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana, the rocket can carry payloads up to 350 kg. The company aims to offer a "cab service to space," where customers can book dedicated launches for their satellites.
"If you want to just go to a friend's house, you don't need a train, you book a cab, an Uber. What we are offering is a cab service to space, which can be used to ride to a unique location in the orbit to place a satellite or visit a station," Chandana said.
If successful, Skyroot's model would appear similar to that of Rocket Lab in the US, which provides small-lift launch vehicles.
The test mission, called Aagman (Sanskrit for "arrival"), aims to place six payloads into orbit. They include scientific instruments such as a robotic arm for removing space debris, an Earth observation camera, and a satellite from a German company.
Symbolic payloads include a lotus made of lab-grown diamonds and a tiny gold rocket with micro-sculptures of three of India's best-known scientists. Each smaller than a grain of rice, the sculptures pay tribute to Nobel Prize-winning physicist CV Raman, aerospace engineer and former president APJ Abdul Kalam, and Vikram Sarabhai.
"We exist because of the Indian space programme, we stand on the shoulders of our early visionaries and this is our way of paying tribute to three great scientists who shaped India's space programme," Chandana explained.
Saturday's launch is the first of two test flights Skyroot plans this year before commercial launches begin next year.
"We have the capacity to build one rocket every month at our factory in the southern city of Hyderabad," Chandana said. "This will be a historic flight for the private space sector in India. It'll be a major milestone," he added.
Skyroot was founded in 2018 when Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, who were colleagues at ISRO, quit their jobs and co-founded the space-tech start-up to build rocket components for satellites. In 2020, India opened the space sector to private firms, allowing them to build rockets and satellites and use ISRO's launch facilities with the aim of increasing the country's share in the global business market from 2% to 10% by 2030.
Since then, the Indian government says more than 400 space start-ups have been set up in India, but Skyroot remains the most successful and the only unicorn in the sector. The company first made headlines in November 2022 when it launched India's first privately developed suborbital rocket.