Vikram-1 reaching orbit marks an important transition in India’s space journey. Built by Skyroot Aerospace, the rocket demonstrates that private enterprise can develop capabilities once concentrated almost entirely within ISRO. Yet its success coincides with reports of an exodus of experienced personnel from the national space agency. India must ensure that one achievement does not come at the expense of the institution that made the other possible. Skyroot’s accomplishment is unquestionably its own.
Vikram-1 was designed and manufactured largely at the company’s facilities in Hyderabad by a remarkably young workforce. This is not an ISRO rocket carrying a private label. But neither did its technological ecosystem emerge from nowhere. Skyroot’s founders, Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, are former ISRO engineers. Former ISRO chairman S. Somanath later became an adviser. The rocket’s large first stage was tested using ISRO infrastructure and Vikram-1 flew from the national agency’s launch facility at Sriharikota. This is precisely how a healthy space ecosystem can work. Public investment creates knowledge and infrastructure that subsequently enables private innovation.
The concern arises when the flow of expertise becomes disproportionately one-way. More than 100 scientists and technical personnel have reportedly left ISRO in recent months, prompting the Department of Space to tighten procedures governing resignations and voluntary retirement from critical programmes. Private space companies can offer higher salaries, equity and faster advancement. Bureaucratic hierarchies, slower promotions and delayed missions make the contrast sharper. Preventing departures administratively is no durable solution. ISRO must instead remain a place where India’s best scientists can pursue work unavailable elsewhere, with better career progression, professional autonomy and rewards for exceptional technical expertise.
The financing of India’s private space revolution adds another dimension. Skyroot has attracted substantial global capital, including investment led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and participation from BlackRock, alongside other investors. Foreign capital itself is not the problem; it can help Indian technology compete globally. But public institutions should not bear the long-term cost of creating scarce expertise while commercial value steadily migrates elsewhere. The relevant model remains the relationship between NASA and America’s private space industry. SpaceX did not make NASA redundant. It flourished partly because decades of public investment had created an immense technological base, while NASA continued undertaking science, exploration and high-risk missions that commercial companies could not replace.
India needs the same complementarity. Private companies should increasingly handle commercial launches, satellites and services, freeing ISRO to move up the technological ladder, pushing deeper into reusable launch systems, human spaceflight, advanced propulsion, lunar infrastructure, planetary science, deep-space missions and technologies whose commercial payoff may be decades away. The measure of reform, therefore, is not how many space unicorns India creates. It is whether, a decade from now, the country possesses both globally competitive private companies and an even stronger ISRO. Vikram-1 shows that India can turn public knowledge into private innovation. The harder task is ensuring that the process multiplies national capability rather than merely redistributing it.