Private firms are beginning to carry weight the state cannot. In May, Skyroot became India’s first space unicorn, valued at $1.1 billion. The ecosystem counts over 300 startups and more than $600 million in cumulative venture funding. Agnikul Cosmos has flown the world’s first fully 3D-printed rocket engine.
On Saturday, Sriharikota had its small midnight reckoning, and the rocket answered it. A 20-metre vehicle built wholly by a private Indian company rose cleanly into orbit, making Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 not merely a machine but a marker in the country’s political imagination. Among its payloads was a German technology demonstrator, a detail easy to pass over and impossible, once noticed, to shrink back into trivia. Before India’s first private orbital rocket had fully entered the historical record, foreign customers had already bought seats on it; after its successful flight, that small fact has become a signal. Thus the satellite slips out of the laboratory and into the chancery. India’s space programme is no longer only science, nor only commerce, but foreign policy in one ascending flame.
The popular story runs through Chandrayaan-3, the Rs 615-crore mission that made India first to land near the lunar south pole; the glory was deserved, but it was advertisement, not product. The product is quieter: 434 satellites for 36 foreign countries, roughly 390 since 2014; more than 300 cooperation agreements with 61 countries and five multilateral bodies. The customer list is a telescope with two ends. The United States accounts for over 230 satellites, including last December’s 6,100-kg BlueBird Block-2 for AST SpaceMobile, India’s heaviest foreign commercial payload. At the other end stand Nepal, Brazil, Algeria and Malaysia, for whom an affordable Indian rocket may be the difference between a space programme and a brochure. Selling reliability to the rich, gifting capability to the poor; no other space power runs this double helix so calmly.
The gift has never been innocent, which does not make it false. In 2017 India launched the South Asia Satellite, offering communications and disaster-management services to six neighbours. Pakistan offered money; Delhi refused, because the thing had to remain a gift: a Rs 250-crore spacecraft anchoring a programme projected at Rs 9,600 crore over twelve years, paid by India, neighbours buying only ground stations. Pakistan declined, citing security concerns; Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have treated it as one option among several, and its operational footprint has been modest. Yet the method survived: absorb cost, own infrastructure, let goodwill sediment. It now works through training rooms and open data, less ceremonial than a launch, more adhesive than a communiqué.
ISRO’s UNNATI programme has taken roughly 90 officials from 48 countries into residential nanosatellite-assembly courses in Bengaluru; the UN-affiliated CSSTEAP centre has trained over 1,500 professionals from more than 50 countries since 1995. This is the old grammar of influence. Men and women taught in your institutions carry away standards, habits, methods, and telephone numbers; the engineer who learns integration at ISRO today may direct a space agency tomorrow. India is planting instruments inside future bureaucracies, with a twenty-year maturity period, and compounding the interest annually.
The newer diplomacy is data, colder in appearance, warmer in consequence. NISAR, the $1.5-billion NASA-India radar satellite launched on an Indian rocket last July, measures shifting land and ice to centimetre precision, making data freely available within a day or two, faster in emergencies. For a climate-vulnerable country unable to buy such capacity, this is not largesse; it is infrastructure, a new eye grafted upon the state. India’s proposed G20 climate-observation satellite, targeted for 2027, puts the same logic on a multilateral frame. Launches, training, data: together they whisper to the Global South of a frugal alternative to American commercial dominance and China’s Space Silk Road; partnership without loans, capacity without dependency.
Orbit has started mirroring earth. By signing the US-led Artemis Accords in June 2023, India moved away from its half-century preference for binding UN-made space treaties; within months Pakistan joined China’s rival lunar coalition. Still Delhi hedged, as it usually does: signing with Washington, abstaining from American-sponsored resolutions on anti-satellite testing, sending Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station on a commercial mission last year, and announcing Bharatiya Antariksh Station, whose first module is targeted for 2028. The sentence remains Indian in structure: cooperate with all, depend on none; touch the alliance, but do not be swallowed.
What is new is that private firms are beginning to carry weight the state cannot. In May, Skyroot became India’s first space unicorn, valued at $1.1 billion after a $60-million round led by Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC and Sherpalo Ventures. The ecosystem counts over 300 startups and more than $600 million in cumulative venture funding. Agnikul Cosmos has flown the world’s first fully 3D-printed rocket engine. Pixxel has deployed India’s first private satellite constellation and been chosen for a 12-satellite national imaging programme. NewSpace India Limited, ISRO’s commercial arm, reported Rs 3,026 crore revenue in FY25, up 43 per cent in a year. The ridges are small, but a terrain is becoming visible through the haze.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The Department of Space budget is roughly Rs 13,400 crore a year; the target is a $44-billion space economy by 2033, holding 8 per cent of the global market, up from $8.4 billion and 2 per cent. No public outlay, plausibly imagined, closes that gulf. Private capital must flow in; hence every gifted satellite and trained engineer also becomes market development for Indian industry. The Rs 27,000-crore military surveillance constellation being fast-tracked, with 52 satellites substantially built by private firms, is the anchor order that makes the sector investable. Soft power and hard power, once filed in separate ministries of the mind, now share the same industrial bone.
The constraints are real; capacity, capital, reliability, three demons walking beside the procession. India can build its heaviest rocket only once every six to eight months; so it won OneWeb at $60 million a launch, undercutting SpaceX, yet cannot win such business at scale, and Pixxel still used Falcon 9. Indian space startups together have raised less than one mid-sized American space company. Then came the PSLV failure early this year, destroying eight foreign satellites, including Nepal’s first student-built spacecraft and a Brazilian payload; the first loss of a foreign customer’s satellite, a clean diplomatic mirror scratched by a third-stage anomaly. Pakistani think tanks advertised the fall within weeks. In space also, failure has witnesses.
India is not really racing the United States or China to the Moon; the stranger and more consequential race is for the middle earth of nations, those countries that need orbit but cannot mortgage sovereignty to reach it. India wants to become indispensable to them, not by thunder alone, though Vikram-1 has now supplied its share of thunder, but by being cheaper, teachable, available, almost familiar. The wager has therefore shifted from possibility to proof. A private Indian rocket has flown; now private Indian firms must turn a decade of diplomatic goodwill into cadence, contracts, factories, failures absorbed, and second flights made ordinary.
Vikram-1’s manifest was a small horoscope of that future: one German customer, three Indian startups, a robotic arm meant to catch space debris, all tied to a first private ascent. Its success gives the symbolism an easy brightness, but the test remains larger than the launch. Can a state-built reputation for frugal reliability pass into the market without evaporating? Can goodwill become an order book, training become demand, data become dependence without the shame of dependency? The answer did not blaze once above Sriharikota, however cleanly the rocket rose. It will accumulate, as all real statecraft does, through repetitions; not one launch, but the next fifty, each a small vote in the dark. Between flame and ledger, gift and sale, the satellite has become India’s most patient envoy: circling, measuring, remembering, returning.
*Brijesh Singh is a senior IPS officer and an author (@brijeshbsingh on X). His latest book on ancient India, “The Cloud Chariot” (Penguin) is out on stands. Views are personal.
