Pawan Kumar Chandana, Co-founder and CEO at Skyroot Aerospace, speaks with BW Businessworld’s Rohit Chintapali about Vikram-1’s orbital launch timeline, India’s space-tech opportunity, AI’s role in rocket engineering, and why valuations matter less than execution. Excerpts:
Skyroot is targeting an orbital launch of Vikram-1 in the first half of 2026. What milestones are you focused on right now in the lead-up to the launch?
The first three stages of the rocket with the propulsion stages are already at the launch site as we speak. Right now, we are testing the brain of the rocket, all the electronic packages and sections that house the avionics.
We are connecting all of them and testing various scenarios. We call this integrated electrical checks. In the coming weeks, we plan to conclude this and then move these sections to the launch site and kick off the launch campaign.
Since this is the first time we are doing it, it is difficult to tell exactly when we will complete it, but hopefully it will be in a few weeks and then we should get to launch.
Skyroot has been around since 2018, but you’re still early in your commercial journey. Are you looking at adjacent revenue streams beyond launch services?
The prime focus will always be launch. But there will be ancillary revenue sources coming from the capabilities we are building.
The manufacturing capabilities and facilities we have built, until we reach something like one rocket a month, we will always have excess capacity. These are world-class manufacturing and development facilities that can be used for building a lot of space hardware.
What kind of ancillary services could realistically emerge from those capabilities?
It is difficult to specify right now. But building rockets requires a wide range of advanced manufacturing and engineering capabilities. Those facilities and capabilities can be used to build many kinds of space hardware.
You’ve spoken about the global space economy reaching USD 1.8 trillion (citing World Economic Forum projection). How do you see India’s opportunity within that?
The Indian government has put out an ambitious plan to capture about a USD 40-44 billion share of the global space market by 2032. I think it is ambitious but achievable. A lot depends on how companies scale over the next five years and how Skyroot scales its plans, how other companies scale theirs, and how the global market perceives the solutions Indian companies are building.
There are many factors involved, but overall, it is ambitious but doable.
You’ve said there are around 400 spacetech companies in India today. Where do you see untapped opportunities for entrepreneurs?
Orbital data centres could be one area. It’s a buzzword right now.
Communication satellites at scale is another area that is still relatively unexplored. Usually, only very large players look at it because it is capital intensive, but there is still a lot of innovation that can be done.
Another big opportunity is using space data and providing analytics and intelligence from it. That is a blue ocean. With AI coming in, space data can be processed faster and insights can be generated for many industries.
Since you brought up AI, how has it influenced Skyroot’s internal workflows?
On the organisational side, we do use some agentic AI tools to help employees.
But on the rocket side of things, AI will be used much more going forward. Right now, most of the AI stack is consumer-oriented and less core engineering-oriented. So many of the tools we use still look very traditional.
But in the coming years, AI will significantly increase the efficiency of designing rocket systems. It will make things faster and more intelligent. AI can also be used in rocket software, especially when we build reusable rockets that can land autonomously.
Has engineering talent in Indian spacetech industry caught up with the AI wave?
The best talent has to catch up. We are making efforts internally to adapt. AI has been described as a tsunami and it has to be adopted very fast. The best users of AI will always have an edge. On the engineering side, we haven’t yet seen the full impact, but over the next five years, AI will definitely transform engineering workflows.
There’s growing talk about Skyroot becoming India’s first spacetech unicorn. Does that matter to you?
Large valuations come with a burden because they create expectations. We are probably the most valued space company in India right now, but value grows only when you create real value and when the market decides that.
Our focus is execution. Rocket science has to be handled very delicately, it can’t be rushed or driven by valuation benchmarks. We will just keep executing our targets and let the market decide the value. |
