‘Cabs to get into space’: How this Indian startup wants to revolutionize satellite space travel

India is one of the world’s top spacefaring nations. It is the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit, and the fourth on the planet to take a spacecraft to the moon, landing closer to the south pole, known for its cratered terrain, than anyone else has.

India is one of the world’s top spacefaring nations. It is the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit, and the fourth on the planet to take a spacecraft to the moon, landing closer to the south pole, known for its cratered terrain, than anyone else has. But its private sector has played a limited role in space exploration, acting mostly as suppliers and vendors for its national space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). That’s changing quickly, owing to a raft of government reforms aiming to boost private participation in the space sector. In the United States, the proliferation of private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have boosted Washington’s space ambitions by driving down costs. Now Indian homegrown startups like Skyroot Aerospace, which launched the country’s first private rocket in 2022, are leading the charge to commercialize India’s space sector and bolster its status as a space superpower. Inside a sleek rocket hanger in the southern city of Hyderabad, the company is preparing for lift-off of the seven-story tall Vikram-1 rocket, which will take India’s first privately launched satellites into orbit. “That’ll be a major milestone for us,” Pawan Chandana, a former ISRO scientist who co-founded Skyroot Aerospace in 2018, told CNN. “Very few companies globally are able to make it to orbit yet.”