When it launched its first rocket in 1963, India was a poor country pursuing the most advanced technology in the world. That projectile, its conical nose pushed to the launch pad by bicycle wheels, placed a small payload 124 miles above Earth. India barely pretends to keep up with the United States and the Soviet Union.
In today’s space race, India has found a much stronger footing.
In a spacious and polished rocket hangar an hour south of Hyderabad, a hub for India’s tech startups, a crowd of young engineers pored over a small experimental cryogenic propulsion. little. The two founders of Skyroot Aerospace, chatting amid whistling steam, explained their excitement at seeing a rocket of their own design mounted on India’s first private satellite in November last year. These new thrusters will drive Skyroot’s next engine into orbit this year, with a much more valuable payload.
Suddenly, India has become home to at least 140 registered space tech startups, including a local field of research that has the potential to transform the planet’s connectivity to the ultimate frontier. . This is one of the most sought after sectors in India for venture capitalists. The growth rate of startups has exploded, leaping from 5 when the pandemic started. And they see a big market to serve. Pawan Kumar Chandana, 32, chief executive officer of Skyroot, predicts global demand for 30,000 satellites to be launched this decade.
India’s importance as a scientific power is taking center stage. When Hosted by President Biden Prime minister Narendra Modi in Washington last month, a White House statement said the two leaders “call for enhanced commercial cooperation between the United States and India’s private sector across the entire value chain of the space economy.” Both countries see space as an arena in which India can emerge as a counterweight to their common rival: China.
For the first three decades, the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, NASA’s local version, made the country proud: The first satellite image of India printed on the 2 rupee note until 1995. Then, for a while, India paid little attention to its space ambitions, with young researchers focusing on more tangible developments in information technology and pharmaceuticals. Now, India is not only the world’s most populous country, but also the fastest-growing major economy and a thriving innovation hub.
The space business has also changed. Driven more by private enterprise than by massive government budgets, space technology is serving smaller, commercial purposes. Imaging systems feed planet information back to Earth, helping Indian farmers secure their crops or commercial fishing fleets track their catches. Satellites carry phone signals to the most remote parts of the country and help run solar farms away from India’s megacities.
Since June 2020, when Mr. Modi announced the promotion of the space sector, open to all types of private enterprises, India has established a network of businesses, each of which is promoted. Driven by original research and homegrown talent. Last year, space startups raked in $120 million in new investments, at a rate of doubling or tripling annually.
As ISRO, pronounced ISS-ro, gives way to new private players, it shares with them a beneficial legacy. Its spaceport, on the coastal island of Sriharikota, is close to the Equator and is suitable for launching into different orbits. The government agency’s “pack horse” rocket is one of the world’s most reliable missiles for large payloads. With a success rate of nearly 95%, it has cut the cost of insuring a satellite in half — making India one of the most competitive launch sites in the world.
And there’s money to launch equipment into space: That market is worth about $6 billion this year and could triple in value by 2025.
In Hyderabad, the work loft of Dhruva Space, home to India’s first satellites and space start-up, is streamlined with dummy satellites, and controlled labs atmosphere called a clean room and an artificial gravity test rig. In any given month, Kranthi Chand, its head of strategy, is hardly there, as he spends about a week in Europe and another week in the United States, attracting customers and houses invest.
It was Elon Musk who stole the buzz of India – and the world – in the space business. His company, SpaceX, and its launchable rockets have helped reduce the cost of putting heavy objects into orbit to a point where India cannot compete. Even today, from US spaceports at $6,500 a kilogram, SpaceX launches are the cheapest anywhere.
India has plenty of affordable engineers, but their lower salaries alone can’t beat the competition. That leaves an Indian company like Skyroot to focus on more specialized services.
“We are more like a taxi,” Mr. Chandana said. His company charges more for smaller payload launches, while SpaceX is “more like a bus or a train, where they take all their passengers and take them to one destination,” he said. he said.
SpaceX pushes India’s startup energy towards space. At the time of Mr. Modi’s priority, several ISRO engineers were on board, including Skyroot’s Mr Chandana and his partner, 33-year-old Bharath Daka.
One of India’s advantages is geopolitics. Two countries that have long offered lower-cost missile launch options are Russia and China. But the war in Ukraine almost ended Russia’s role as a competitor. OneWeb, a British satellite startup, lost $230 million after Russia seized 36 of its spacecraft in September. OneWeb then turned to India’s ISRO to send the satellite beam further. his follow into orbit. Likewise, the US government would be more likely to approve any US company sending military-grade technology through India than through China.
India’s supplier ecosystem is staggering in size. Decades of business cooperation with ISRO have spawned some 400 privately owned companies in clusters around Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and elsewhere, each devoted to making special screws, sealants and seals. distinctive and other products suitable for the space. One hundred people can collaborate in one launch.
Skyroot and Dhruva operate in the relatively attractive areas of satellite launch and delivery, but together, these sectors represent only 8% of India’s slice of the space business. A much larger share comes from companies that specialize in collecting data transmitted by satellite.
Pixelxel is a notable startup in that field. It has developed an imaging system to detect patterns on the Earth’s surface that are outside the normal range of color vision. It has its headquarters in Bengaluru and an office in Los Angeles – as well as a contract with a secret agency within the Pentagon. Even larger swaths of the satellite business will inevitably shift to consumer broadband and television services, delivered from low orbit.
In Skyroot’s hangar, their engineers turned entrepreneurs, trained at two of India’s original Institutes of Technology and gained hands-on experience working at ISRO, speaking languages. venture capital language. After the “seed round,” Chandana recounted, “followed by round A, about 11 million, and then a round of 4.5 million.”
Their company is now valued at $68 million after four rounds. But they don’t plan to withdraw anytime soon. Apparently they were more interested in science than in business, an area neither of them studied. Running a company, Mr. Chandana said, is “just common sense”.
