City’s ‘rocketmen’ duo aim for the skies

Their startup test-fired India’s first privately-built fully cryogenic engine last month

When Skyroot Aerospace successfully tested Dhawan-1 last month, it became the country’s first privately developed fully cryogenic rocket engine running on two high-performance rocket propellants — liquid natural gas (LNG) and liquid oxygen (LoX). The indigenous engine was developed using 3D printing with a superalloy.

That has set the city-based firm on a higher trajectory with an ambitious plan to launch the first private space launch vehicle using cryogenic engine Vikram-2 into orbit in two years. Before that, the two co-founders C. Pawan Kumar (IIT-Kharagpur, 2012 batch) and Naga Bharath D (IIT-Madras, 2012 batch) plan to put its first launch vehicle, 20-metre tall Vikram-1 based on solid propulsion engine, in space. This was after successfully designing and developing the solid propulsion rocket engine, the first private firm in the country to do so.