Vikram-1 reaches orbit: Hyderabad's Skyroot makes India's first private orbital launch

Hyderabad Stories published this report on 11 October 2026 as part of a review of July 2026. It was drafted with AI assistance from the reports listed at the end, each read in full; quotations are as those reports printed them. Photo above — Illustration: the Vikram family of rockets developed by Skyroot Aerospace (not a photograph of the launch).

At 12:05 pm on Saturday, 18 July 2026 — 35 minutes after its scheduled 11:30 am slot — Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota. Skyroot said afterwards that the rocket had reached orbit at an altitude of 450 km and an inclination of 60 degrees, making the Hyderabad company the first private Indian firm to put a rocket into orbit. It was Skyroot's second launch, after the suborbital Vikram-S in 2022.

The four-stage rocket, designed to carry small satellites of up to 350 kg to low-Earth orbit, flew test payloads from Indian and foreign companies, including Skyroot's own SCOPE satellite and demonstration payloads from Grahaa Space, Cosmoserve and Germany's DCubed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched virtually and called co-founder and chief executive Pawan Kumar Chandana; ISRO chairman V. Narayanan and IN-SPACe chairman Pawan Goenka were among those at the launch site. "We want to be able to do consecutive launches in a small timeframe," Chandana said of the company's plans to establish the rocket's reliability.

It came ten weeks after Skyroot became India's first space-technology unicorn. The company plans further test flights before commercial Vikram-1 launches from 2027; the larger Vikram-2 is targeted for its first flight in 2027 at the earliest.

The orbit figures are as stated by Skyroot; the sources consulted did not report an independent official confirmation.

Sources

• Skyroot Aerospace makes history for India with first launch success — Via Satellite, 20 July 2026
• Vikram-1, India's first private rocket, successfully reaches orbit — ThePrint, 18 July 2026