India launches a CAB SERVICE TO SPACE and yes there's a diamond lotus
History! Made! Skyroot Aerospace — India's first space-tech unicorn — launched Vikram-1 from Sriharikota on Saturday, and sixteen minutes later India became just the third country on Earth with a private company in orbit. Sixteen minutes! It takes longer to choose a movie!
And the business model is adorable AND brilliant: a 'cab service to space'. Don't wait years sharing a giant rocket on someone else's schedule — book your own ride to your own orbit, like an Uber, but the destination is the cosmos. Satellite operators everywhere just felt their shoulders drop three inches.
The cargo! A robotic arm for cleaning up space debris (space tidying!), an Earth observation camera, a German satellite — and, because engineers are secret poets, a lotus made of lab-grown diamonds and a tiny gold rocket carrying rice-grain-sized sculptures of three great Indian scientists. 'Like a diamond in the sky' is no longer a lyric. It's a MANIFEST.
Two founders quit their jobs in 2018 to build this. Eight years later: orbit, a factory that can build a rocket a month, and 400 more Indian space start-ups climbing behind them. What a time to be alive — and slightly above it! Another gift!