VIKRAM (विक्रम) — India, 2026

Skyroot Aerospace was just one in a long line of hopeful small rocket startups that I knew of but didn’t write an article about, because I saw no specific reason to expect them to be more successful that their peers. So just as in the case of, say, Space Pioneer, I was unprepared when it turned out that they were better than the rest.

Skyroot Aerospace is based in Hyderabad, which is deep inland and a full day’s drive away from India’s Satish Dhawan launch complex on the southeast coast near Chennai. They were founded in 2018 by two veterans of the national space agency, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), Pawan Kumar Chandana, and Naga Bharath Daka.

Their rocket family’s name, Vikram (which comes from an old Sanskrit word meaning “courageous”), is taken from the first name of the guy remembered as the father of Indian spaceflight, Vikram Sarabhai, who was the first head of ISRO. They launched a small suborbital pathfinder called Vikram-S in 2022, and then the Vikram-1 reached orbit on the first try — a deed that relatively few rocket startup companies successfully achieve, especially ones with funding as modest as Skyroot’s was. That successful orbital test, which carried two cubesats, was only the second time they had ever sent anything off the ground. They beat every private company in Europe — in fact, every private company outside the USA and China, unless you count Rocket Lab, which on paper is a California company.

The Vikrams are solid rockets. The Vikram-S used a single solid motor called a Kalam 80. The Vikram-1 has three solid stages: a Kalam 1000 — no wait, it’s Kalam 1200 — on the bottom, then a Kalam 250, then a Kalam 100, and as a topper, a hypergolic kick stage using a motor called Raman-2, assisted by four little Raman-1 vernier thrusters, burning monomethylhydrazine. The numbers on the different sizes of Kalam motors roughly correspond to their thrust in kilonewtons. As far as I can discern all of these motors are made in-house by Skyroot. The solid motors are modern in design, with carbon fiber casings, vectorable ablative nozzles, and some kind of novel thermal protection setup.

Upon reaching orbit with a small solid rocket, most new companies would promptly boast of the entirely different and much larger rocket they’re sure to put into production in an impressively brief span of time, but Skyroot is taking a more incremental approach. The Vikram-2 is going to keep the bottom two solid stages, but replace the third with a cryogenic methane burner, so the kick stage is no longer needed, and the payload is significantly higher, maybe 600 kilograms. The engine for that, the Dhawan-1, has been blasting away on test stands since 2021. It’s largely 3D-printed. The Vikram-3 is described as just being the 2 except with strap-ons for extra thrust.

Vikram-1: mass unknown, diam 1.7 m, thrust ~1200 kN, imp unknown, solid fuel, payload 0.35 t, cost unknown, record 0/1/0 through July 2026.