Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 reached orbit on Saturday, July 18, after lifting off from ISRO’s First Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota under Mission Aagaman, completing its final burn and injecting its payloads into a roughly 450 km orbit — making India only the third country after the United States and China to have a private firm demonstrate orbital launch capability.
Skyroot confirmed the milestone on X shortly after 12:22 pm, declaring “Orbit Achieved.”
Who built Vikram-1
Skyroot Aerospace was founded in 2018 by Pawan Kumar Chandana, who serves as CEO, and Naga Bharath Daka, the company’s COO — both former scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation before they left to start the company. Chandana, addressing the team ahead of the flight, described it as a proud moment for India, pointing to the significance of a private Indian company operating at this level.
Daka struck a similar note from Sriharikota, framing the launch as the payoff of eight years of work building affordable, dependable launch capability out of India for satellite operators worldwide.</cite> He said the effort behind the mission draws on roughly 1,000 people and more than 400 suppliers, built up over nearly 3,000 days.
The all-carbon, 3D-printed rocket
Vikram-1 is a four-stage, roughly 20-metre rocket built with carbon-composite airframes and 3D-printed liquid engines — engineering choices aimed at cutting structural weight while keeping the vehicle capable of orbital insertion manoeuvres.
It can carry about 350 kg of payload, and this test flight, called Aagaman (“Arrival” in Sanskrit), also carried Skyroot’s own SCOPE satellite to gather performance data, alongside two symbolic payloads: an 18-karat gold model rocket and a lab-grown-diamond art piece.
An ISRO veteran now advises the company
Adding to the founders’ story, former ISRO chairman S. Somanath recently joined Skyroot as honorary Chief Technical Advisor ahead of this launch — a mentorship link between the state space agency and the private venture it helped enable.
Skyroot’s first flight, the suborbital Vikram-S in November 2022, had already made it the first Indian private company to launch from ISRO’s facilities; Vikram-1 is its first attempt at reaching orbit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called the launch “a historic new frontier for India’s space journey” ahead of lift-off, and Skyroot has described its longer-term ambition as running a “cab service to space” for satellite customers.
With orbit now confirmed, Vikram-1 becomes the first Indian private rocket to complete that journey — a milestone Skyroot itself called, simply, “History is made.”
