Skyroot, India’s First Private Launcher, To Orbit Foreign and Indian satellites in 2025

Indian private rocket maker Skyroot Aerospace will be orbiting multiple cube satellites belonging foreign and Indian owners sometime this year with its Vikram-I launch vehicle, said a top company official earlier in March 2025.

“While the exact month for the launch of Vikram-1 is yet to be confirmed, we are in the advanced stages of flight qualification tests of various systems and subsystems,” Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-Founder told this writer.

“These tests are crucial for ensuring the readiness of the launch vehicle for its maiden flight in 2025. In the coming weeks and months, we are looking forward to conducting a few major tests, including the payload fairing separation test and the stage-1 static fire test,” Chandana added.

Queried about the payloads – Indian and foreign- Chandana said: “We have few payloads flying on our first launch details of which we will be releasing closer to the launch date.”

It is learnt the company is looking to fly its Vikram-I rocket –with a full carrying capacity-sometime during the middle of this year and inject the satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Around 15 minutes after the lift off from the Srihairkota rocket port owned by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) the cubesats will be ejected using an ultra-low shock pneumatic separation system.

Skyroot and homage to Dr. Sarabhai

The commercial flight of Vikram-I will be the country’s first rocket belonging to a private company after the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened up the space sector for private players.

Skyroot Aerospace has named its rocket as Vikram after Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, founder of the Indian Space Programme.

The company has two more rocket variants- Vikram-II and Vikram-III- with a higher carrying capacity.

In 2022, Skyroot Aerospace carried out successfully the flight test of its rocket Vikram-S in a sub-orbital mission from the Sriharikota rocket port.

The rocket reached a peak altitude of 89.5 km.

It was also the first test flight of a rocket belonging to a private company from Indian soil.

In 2018, Skyroot Aerospace was set up with seed funding by an Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal.