The New Space Rage

A bunch of startups is turbo-charging India's space economy, doing everything from building launch systems to providing satellite services

- Manish Pant

WHEN SRINATH RAVICHANDRAN, 36, and Moin S.P.M., 31, aren't hitting the ball across the boundary in a game of backyard cricket, they are working on sending their Agnibaan series of low-cost rockets into space. Ravichandran, who has a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, first thought of the idea while networking with people from the commercial space domain in Los Angeles who had designed satellites but didn't know how to put them into the earth's orbit. “When I naively asked around as to why that was a problem, I was told that it was due to either the absence of the right kind of rockets or partners,” he tells Business Today. Finally, Ravichandran, who had previously worked as an electrical engineer and a finance person, and was tracking the development of Elon Musk's SpaceX programme, quit his job and returned to India. Here, he co-founded Agnikul Cosmos with Moin—they had bonded over-friendly cricket matches at the same ground in Chennai–in 2017 to be a part of what some commentators have termed the new space rage.

The duo is part of an ever-increasing tribe of new-age entrepreneurs who have consciously chosen to foray into the commercial space sector, a territory where not many in the country had dared to venture earlier. The final frontier is the new rage among several start-ups that are working on everything and anything to do with space, that is, from building launch systems and satellites to working on other related applications.