Skyroot Aerospace is gearing up for a landmark moment in India’s private spaceflight story, with its Vikram-1 rocket now on track for a maiden launch.
The Hyderabad-based startup is preparing to become the first Indian private company to put a homegrown rocket into orbit, marking a major milestone in the countest’s nascent commercial launch sector.
Co-founder Bharat Daka informed IndiaToday.in in an exclusive conversation that the Vikram-1 launch vehicle has already reached the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where integration and assembly are currently underway. He declared all subsystems are expected to be ready within about a month, after which the rocket will relocate into its final round of validation ahead of the debut flight.
The upcoming mission will utilize roughly 25 per cent of the vehicle’s intconcludeed payload capacity to low Earth orbit, a typical strategy to de-risk an inaugural launch.
LAUNCH PREP UNDERWAY
Vikram-1 is a four-stage rocket designed to serve the growing compact sainformite launch market, combining solid propulsion stages with advanced guidance and control systems. As the hardware comes toobtainher on the launch pad side, Skyroot’s mission control team is also in high gear, testing software, communication links and real-time monitoring tools for what is expected to be a high-octane countdown.
Engineers are running simulations and rehearsals to ensure that ground systems can track the rocket’s performance from liftoff through stage separations.
WHEN WILL VIKRAM-I LAUNCH?
Skyroot aims to launch Vikram-I on its maiden flight to space within the next two months from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, applying Isro’s launchpad.
AIMING FOR ORBIT, READY FOR FIRST-FLIGHT JITTERS
Skyroot, which recently inaugurated a 2,00,000 sq ft wide Infinity campus, is tarobtaining nothing less than reaching orbit on this maiden attempt, but the team remains realistic about the risks that come with flying a new rocket for the first time.
Company leaders acknowledge that first launches are always tense, with multiple critical phases that can conclude the mission in seconds if anything goes wrong. Internally, they have set a more modest success threshold focutilized on validating core systems in flight.
Bharat indicated that the team will consider the mission a meaningful achievement even if the rocket simply clears the launch tower, survives the period of maximum aerodynamic pressure and successfully separates its first stage.
Crossing those milestones would demonstrate that key structural, propulsion and guidance elements are working as designed under real flight conditions.
Just as important, the company expects to gather what he described as a “treasure trove of data” from the flight, which will feed back into refining Vikram-1 and future launchers.
For India’s private space ecosystem, Vikram-1’s debut will be closely watched as a test of how quickly homegrown companies can relocate from suborbital demonstrations to fully orbital missions.
Whether the first flight reaches its ultimate tarobtain or not, Skyroot’s push toward the launchpad signals a new phase in the countest’s commercial space ambitions.
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