Industry Odisha Bureau, Jul 26: In 2019, India had fewer than ten private space companies. By 2023 it had more than 140. Nothing about the country’s engineering talent changed in those four years. What changed was a rule.
Until June 2020, ISRO held an effective monopoly over launch activity, and building a private rocket in India was, in practical terms, not permissible. The consequence was visible in the numbers. Between 2010 and 2022, payloads and rocket bodies in low Earth orbit more than doubled, and the global space economy swelled from roughly $270 billion to about $400 billion by 2019 a boom driven increasingly by commercial operators rather than state agencies. India’s share of that private launch market was essentially zero. Its aerospace engineers, unable to build commercially at home, went abroad and built elsewhere.
The irony was sharp. ISRO had already done what few agencies anywhere could claim: Mangalyaan entered Martian orbit on a first attempt, at a cost of around ₹450 crore. Capability was never in question. Commercial access was.
Skyroot Aerospace was founded in 2018, two years before the reform, by former ISRO scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka a company built in advance of the law that would make it viable. Early capital arrived unconventionally: entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal put in ₹10 crore after an unsolicited LinkedIn message. Once the sector opened, roughly $15 million followed in 2021 and $50 million in 2022, funding India’s first privately built rocket.
The commercial logic rests on a gap the incumbents leave open. Government launch slots carry long waits. International rideshare missions run on fixed profiles, dropping every payload at the same altitude and inclination workable for many satellites, costly for Earth observation craft that must burn their own fuel to reach precise sun-synchronous orbits. Skyroot’s model is dedicated delivery to customer-specified orbits, bookable through a digital platform, at roughly $5 million to $10 million per launch.
Cost discipline comes from two places. Access to ISRO’s existing test and launch infrastructure removes the $100–200 million in capital expenditure that Western entrants have had to raise. Extensive 3D printing of engines and structural components strips out much of what remains.
Around that, an ecosystem is forming upstream in rockets, propulsion and ground stations, downstream in Earth observation, agriculture, disaster management and geospatial analytics with New Delhi supporting it through higher FDI limits, tax incentives and dedicated funding. The projected value: about $77 billion by decade’s end.
Vikram Sarabhai argued the real return on space was national confidence. The reform suggests a narrower lesson: the bottleneck was never talent.
