New Delhi: The successful launch of Vikram-1, India’s first privately-developed orbital rocket, is a culmination of a journey which started with what Skyroot Aerospace co-founder and CEO Pawan Chandana describes as big dreams despite almost impossible odds of it being successful.
In a ThePrint Off The Cuff interview earlier this month, Chandana recalled that when he co-founded Skyroot in 2018, he had expected that it would take nearly a decade just to create the conditions needed to build a private rocket company in India.
There was no policy backing the space sector when the company had just started and even raising capital was difficult as very few investors thought that a private company could build launch vehicles.
Despite the challenges, Chandana said that he took up the challenge because the two main ideas, entrepreneurship and rockets were his life long passions. He grew up in a middle class family in Visakhapatnam. And while studying at IIT, the startup ecosystem had begun to take shape due to which he believed that a business could just start with an idea. But it was during his six years as an ISRO scientist where he worked on the LVM3 launch vehicle, that the idea for Skyroot took shape.
“Why can’t we build a private rocket company?” he said. “It felt like the marriage of two passions: entrepreneurship and rockets.”
Leaving a secure government job was a difficult decision, particularly at a time when India’s private space sector had barely taken shape. Chandana said the odds were against him, but he believed commercial access to space would become increasingly important. Despite all these difficulties, Skyroot has now become one of India’s fastest growing deep tech startups. But for Chandana this achievement is just another milestone. “We’re still taking baby steps,” he said.
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