‘We create space talent; not just hire it’: Pawan Kumar Chandana

Interview/ Pawan Kumar Chandana, CEO and cofounder, Skyroot Aerospace

India’s space journey took off in 1963, with the launch of a sounding rocket from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) near Thiruvananthapuram. Sixty-three years later, it hit another milestone—the successful launch of Vikram-1, the nation’s first-ever privately built orbital rocket. With that, India became only the third country in the world, after the US and China, to have a private company capable of orbital launches. The company: Skyroot Aerospace.

Vikram-1 successfully reached low earth orbit on July 18, carrying several technology demonstration payloads and postcards, including a handwritten one from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The prime minister later posted a congratulatory note on X, saying that the achievement reflects the talent, hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of India’s youth.

Until now, building complete rockets in India was mostly the job of the Indian Space Research Organisation. This was for the first time that a rocket, as part of Mission Aagaman (arrival in Sanskrit), was sent into earth’s orbit using a launch vehicle built outside ISRO’s programme. An orbital launch simply means the rocket places a satellite into space in such a way that it keeps circling the earth, instead of falling back down. For this mission, Vikram-1 aimed for an orbit of about 450km above sea level.

Vikram-1 was named after Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space programme and the man instrumental in setting up TERLS. The rocket, with a payload capacity of up to 350kg, carried six payloads, including scientific instruments, a robotic arm to remove space debris, an earth observation camera and satellites, one of them from a German company. Two symbolic payloads were also part of the mission—a lotus made from lab-grown diamonds, called Cosmic Bloom, and a tiny gold rocket carrying micro-sculptures, each smaller than a grain of rice, honouring Nobel Prize-winning physicist C.V. Raman, former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Sarabhai.

Vikram-1 has India’s longest one-piece carbon composite rocket stage, built as a single strong structure instead of combining many separate parts. Its Orbital Adjustment Module uses 3D-printed liquid engine, the first of its kind on an Indian orbital rocket. Post the success of Vikram-1, Skyroot Aerospace has officially begun shipping the hardware for its second rocket to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, targeting another test flight by the end of 2026.

Like Sarabhai, Skyroot’s CEO and cofounder Pawan Kumar Chandana, too, has a Thiruvananthapuram connect. After completing his mechanical engineering (both graduate and master’s) from IIT Kharagpur in 2012, he was recruited on campus by ISRO and joined its Thiruvananthapuram rocket-making facility. Chandana, 35, who grew up in Visakhapatnam, worked there for six years and was part of the LVM3 programme. In 2018, he cofounded Skyroot Aerospace, which went on to become India’s first space tech unicorn, valued at $1.1 billion. Excerpts from an interview:

Q/ Vikram-1 is fully designed and built in India, with a large domestic supplier base. Where is the supply chain still thin—the part that would break first if you tried to fly every month?

The challenge is less about identifying one component and more about building aerospace-grade depth across the supply chain. A supplier being able to manufacture something once is different from being able to deliver it repeatedly, within specification, on schedule and with complete traceability. At higher launch cadence, consistency becomes as important as capability.

There are areas where the Indian ecosystem is already very strong, and others where specialised materials, electronics, precision manufacturing or space-qualified components still have relatively few suppliers. As we move towards higher cadence, we are working on both sides of that problem, developing suppliers while also bringing strategically important capabilities in-house where that gives us better control over quality, cost and schedule.

Q/ You said that more than 90 per cent of the team had never worked in the space sector when they joined Skyroot. Following a successful orbital flight, is hiring still a constraint? Or, is the problem more about retaining people who now have flight heritage?

One of the things we are most proud of is that we have been able to create space talent, not just hire it. More than 90 per cent of our team came to Skyroot without prior experience in the space sector. Today, many of those engineers have designed, built, tested and flown hardware to orbit. That is a remarkable transformation in a relatively short period. Vikram-1 has also changed what young engineers can imagine doing in India's private sector. They can join a company in Hyderabad or Bengaluru, take ownership of real flight systems early in their careers, and see their work go to space. As we scale, our focus is on continuing to build that pipeline, bringing in talented engineers, giving them deep hands-on exposure and creating the next generation of India’s space engineering talent.

Q/ More than a month after the first orbit, stage 1 of the next vehicle is already moving to Sriharikota. What is hard about going from “we did it once” to “we can do it again on a clock”?

The first successful flight proves that the architecture works. Repeating it reliably is a very different engineering and organisational challenge. Now you have to convert a programme into a production system. Components have to arrive predictably, manufacturing processes need repeatability, testing has to happen on schedule, suppliers have to scale with you, and quality cannot dilute as cadence increases. A rocket has thousands of things that must come together correctly, and higher cadence means doing that repeatedly without taking shortcuts. The next phase for Skyroot is not simply about building another Vikram-1. It is about building the capability to produce and launch Vikram vehicles with increasing frequency and predictable quality.

Q/ You often say Vikram-1 is a cab, not a train. After the first flight, are customers paying for the cab ride, where they have the freedom to choose the destination, orbit, timeline? Or, are they still comparing you to a cheaper rideshare seat?

The fundamental value of a dedicated launch is control. For a satellite operator, the launch cost is only one part of the overall mission economics. The ability to choose the right orbit, launch at the right time and deploy without depending on the schedule or destination of a much larger mission can be extremely valuable. That is what we mean when we describe Vikram as a cab rather than a train. You are not simply buying kilogrammes to orbit; you are buying a mission designed around your satellite. As satellite constellations grow and customers become more particular about deployment timelines and orbital requirements, we believe that flexibility and responsiveness will become increasingly important. Vikram-1 is designed precisely for that market.

Q/ Most first orbital flights carry dummy mass. You put real customer payloads on Vikram-1. Why take that risk on attempt one?

Because ultimately a launch vehicle exists to deliver payloads to space. Of course, carrying customer payloads on a maiden orbital flight raises the stakes. We were very transparent with our customers that this was a developmental flight, and they understood the associated risk.

But it also forced us to approach the mission as a real launch service rather than simply a rocket demonstration. Payload integration, interfaces, mission planning, deployment and customer coordination—all had to work together. For us, reaching orbit with real payloads made Vikram-1’s first flight much closer to proving the complete launch-service architecture we intend to operate.

Q/ Looking ahead, what do you need from the government that you cannot buy or build yourself?

Some parts of the space ecosystem are inherently national infrastructure. A private company cannot independently replicate a launch range, airspace and maritime coordination, tracking networks or the regulatory architecture required for orbital launches. The support from ISRO, IN-SPACe and the government has therefore been extremely important. As launch activity increases, what the industry will increasingly need is predictability: predictable access to infrastructure, clear regulatory timelines, efficient authorisations and frameworks that make it easier for Indian companies to serve global customers. The government does not need to build our rockets for us. Industry must do that. But a strong enabling environment can allow companies like ours to build and compete much faster.

Q/ Five years from now, what would make you say the reputation of Indian private launchers, and not just Skyroot’s, is settled?

[I will say that] when an international satellite company choosing a launcher evaluates an Indian private launch company exactly as it evaluates an American, European or any other global provider. Not because it is Indian, not because it is cheaper, but because it has a record of reliable missions, competitive economics, predictable schedules and strong engineering. One successful flight creates attention. Repeated successful flights create confidence. A sustained record creates reputation. Five years from now, success for me would be seeing multiple Indian space companies serving global customers, launching frequently and being considered an integral part of the global space supply chain. That is when we will know that Indian private space has moved from being an exciting emerging story to an established global industry.