India's First Private Rocket Reaches Orbit on Dramatic Debut Launch
India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch
Skyroot Aerospace achieved a historic milestone with the successful orbital debut of its Vikram-1 rocket, India's first privately developed launcher. Despite a brief delay and a minor anomaly during stage separation, the vehicle reached a 280-mile orbit on its very first attempt, beating the odds faced by other space startups. This success marks a major leap for India's commercial space sector, validated by US military tracking and celebrated by government officials.
On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible.
- mayama
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
- itissid
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).
- zbentley
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.
- sidcool
Only the third country to achieve this. Kudos.
There's another startup trying reusable rockets.
- josefresco
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
- jdiez17
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.
- elevation
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).
- ChuckMcM
Quite the achievement, congratulations! I'm really curious to see how things unfold when tens of private companies can launch payloads into LEO.