Skyroot to go fully commercial with third launch, to ship rocket for second test flight by Nov-end | Hyderabad News

Hyderabad: Skyroot Aerospace is gearing up to complete the shipping of its Vikram-1 rocket to Sriharikota for its second test flight by the end of Nov, and expects to go fully commercial with its third mission, the space startup’s co-founder Naga Bharath Daka told TOI.“By the end of the calendar year, in Dec or early Jan, we hope to launch our second test mission. From our third mission, we will go fully commercial,” Bharath said.In July this year, Skyroot became the first Indian private firm to launch an indigenously built orbital-class rocket into space and place a satellite in orbit. Skyroot flagged off the first-stage hardware of the next Vikram-1 rocket to ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre towards the end of Aug.“Just 36 days since Vikram-1 launched, the hardware for our next launch is en route to the launch site. Team Skyroot keeps building and building — from India to the world,” Skyroot co-founder Pawan Kumar Chandana had said in a post on X at the time.Vikram-1 created history on July 18, when Mission Aagaman became the first privately developed Indian orbital-class launch vehicle to reach low Earth orbit. The rocket lifted off from Sriharikota and placed its payloads in a 450-km orbit.The mission validated Skyroot’s carbon-composite structures, solid propulsion stages and 3D-printed engine technologies. The company had already begun work on its second Vikram test-flight rocket even before the maiden orbital mission, while the first rocket was being readied for launch at the ISRO spaceport.While the first Vikram-1 was manufactured and shipped from Skyroot’s headquarters, MaxQ, near the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad, the second test-flight rocket is being built at the company’s 2 lakh sq-ft Infinity Campus. The facility, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Nov last year, is designed to eventually support a launch cadence of one rocket a month.