Skyroot's Vikram-1 reaches orbit on 3D printed engines

Orbit on the first attempt

On July 18, 2026, a 22 meter rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India's east coast and did something no Indian private company had managed before. It reached orbit. Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 climbed to a 450 kilometer low Earth orbit in a 16 minute flight and released six payloads. The company called the mission Aagman, a Sanskrit word for arrival, and the name fits.

The flight makes Skyroot the first privately owned Indian firm to reach orbit. It also puts India in a small club. Only the United States and China have previously seen a homegrown private company pull off an orbital launch.

An engine built layer by layer

The detail that matters most to this audience sits on the rocket's fourth stage. Vikram-1's Orbital Adjustment Module, the part that places payloads into precise orbits, runs on a cluster of 3D printed Raman-1 engines. Skyroot calls it India's first fully 3D printed orbital engine, and these units can restart in the vacuum of space, which let the rocket drop satellites into different orbits during one flight.

Moving from cast and machined parts to printed ones changed the math on production. Skyroot says the shift cut build time from months per engine to days. That speed is the whole point. The company is chasing the small satellite market, where operators want a dedicated rocket on their schedule instead of a seat on someone else's big launch.

Carbon, code, and a Hyderabad factory

The engines were not the only additively influenced part. Vikram-1 uses carbon composite airframes and modular avionics, a build philosophy aimed at keeping each rocket affordable to make. Skyroot's factory in Hyderabad is set up to produce roughly one rocket per month.

From a garage idea to a unicorn

Skyroot was founded in 2018 by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, both former ISRO engineers. They proved the concept with Vikram-S, a suborbital test vehicle, in 2022. Earlier this year the company became India's first space tech unicorn with a valuation near 1.1 billion dollars. The orbital flight landed one day before Skyroot's eighth birthday.

The payloads on this first flight mixed utility with symbolism: a robotic arm built to grab space debris, an Earth observation camera, and small tributes including a lab grown diamond lotus and a gold rocket bearing micro sculptures of Indian science figures Vikram Sarabhai, C.V. Raman, and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Skyroot plans at least one more test flight before moving to paid commercial launches next year. If the second flight holds up, the company will have turned a printed engine into a working business faster than almost anyone expected.