New Delhi, July 18 (IANS). An ambitious dream started by two former ISRO scientists in the year 2018 has today become the biggest success story of India’s private space sector. Skyroot Aerospace, led by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharat Daka, has created history by launching India’s first successful private orbital launch vehicle.
Former ISRO scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharat Daka founded Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace in 2018 with the aim of making satellite launches as easy and affordable as booking commercial flights.
Currently Pawan Kumar Chandana is leading the company as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Naga Bharat Daka as the Chief Operating Officer (COO). Under his leadership, a team of more than 1,000 professionals is working on rocket design, propulsion, avionics and launch systems.
Nearly two decades ago, Pawan Kumar Chandana passed the IIT entrance exam in the first attempt and took admission in IIT Kharagpur.
While most engineering graduates pursue high-paying jobs in the technology industry, Chandana’s passion was space and rockets.
This passion led him to ISRO, where he was directly selected from IIT Kharagpur campus.
At ISRO, he worked on India’s most powerful launch vehicle GSLV Mark-3 and played an important role in its development.
He also received ISRO’s Internal Innovation Award for his excellent work. Working for 6 years at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center in Thiruvananthapuram, he gained extensive experience in rocket design and development and made significant contributions to India’s growing space program.
Whereas, Naga Bharat Daka is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Skyroot Aerospace. Before starting the company, he worked as a flight computer engineer at ISRO, where he designed and developed several avionics modules for Indian launch vehicles.
Naga Bharat Daka, an alumnus of IIT Madras, holds a Masters degree in Microelectronics & VLSI Design. Apart from this, he has also obtained Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering.
He has extensive experience in avionics, semiconductor technology, and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) systems. This expertise has proven vital in the development of Skyroot Aerospace’s launch vehicles.
There was a time when no investor was willing to fund the company. At the same time, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal was the first to express confidence in him and invest. Shortly after this, the Covid pandemic arrived and the company also faced a crisis. But Greenco supported him during this difficult period. Later the company raised larger funding of $51 million and then $60 million. Today, global investors like GIC and Temasek have also expressed confidence in the company and its valuation has reached $1.1 billion.
In the year 2020, Skyroot achieved the distinction of being the first private company in India to successfully test the ‘Raman-1’ engine. Then came the ‘Dhawan-1’ cryogenic engine, and then the first private agreement with ISRO in 2021. ‘Vikram-S’ was launched on 18 November 2022 and thus India saw a private rocket flying in the sky for the first time. After this, continuous tests were conducted for ‘Vikram-1’, and finally the day came when India’s first private orbital rocket took off from Sriharikota and proved the country’s space prowess to the whole world.
–IANS
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