Agnikul eyes 100 launches per year for its reusable small rocket by 2030

New Delhi: Chennai-based Agnikul Cosmos, one of India’s two private rocket manufacturing ventures, plans to conduct 100 rocket launches with its reusable rocket in the next five years. But the company isn’t copying Elon Musk’s approach to achieving that goal and instead believes it can work with customers to make its rockets profitable within the next two years.

In an interview with MintAgnikul Cosmos co-founder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran said it was ‘very likely’ that the company would conduct its first commercial reusable rocket launch next year.

“We don’t have a set date for that, but we’re preparing our next launch, which will have commercial customers for next year. We’ll probably scale up to 12-15 launches per year in the next two years, and by 2030 we hope to see 100 launches per year, or one rocket launch every three days for us,” he said.

At the center of Agnikul’s efforts are reusable rocket launches. On November 22, the company raised $17 million in a Series C financing round at a $500 million valuation. The company recently raised capital based on its efforts to build the fully 3D-printed reusable two-stage rocket Agnibaan.

“We will try to have the booster portion of our rocket (the part that carries the rocket’s engine) land vertically on a barge in the ocean and recover it from there to be reused in future missions. But not only that, by working closely with customers and offering the first stage of the rocket as the basis for a satellite, we can make our first stage (the main part of the rocket that carries the satellites) reusable so that we can fully utilize every part of our rocket and maximize our revenue potential,” said Ravichandran.

economic pivot

Of course, this is different from what Elon Musk’s SpaceX is doing today, making the concept of reusable rockets a reality. SpaceX is also recovering its booster stage to reuse launch engines and lower the cost of space missions, while also trying to salvage its first stage for greater reusability.

“Such engineering requires huge capital, years of research, and can only be applied in large rockets that operate at a completely different scale. We are not trying to compete with them, but we are trying to bring reusability to the small rockets sector – we have already received a global patent for this,” Ravichandran said.

But space industry stakeholders have raised questions about whether reusability will be possible for small rockets. Ravichandran’s Agnibaan as well as the Vikram-I rocket in Chandana’s Skyroot are also classified as small rockets; It primarily targets satellites launched into low earth orbit, and can carry payloads of up to 500 kg at an altitude of up to 500 km above the ground.

“While it’s true that reusability is great for larger rockets that are very expensive to build, there’s nothing stopping Agnikul from building reusable rockets and proving they can do it at scale. At the end of the day, if they can do this, they will create a new cost structure and become a major stakeholder in the global small rocket market, which sees participants growing worldwide,” said Chaitanya Giri, a space expert at global think tank, Observer Research Foundation.

But Ravichandran disagreed. “The cost of launching a single mission is less than $2 million. My goal with the current cost is that we can run a profitable rocket launch services business even with a small margin above that cost. Reusability will also reduce my engineering and logistics costs; for example, when we scale up to 100 launches per year, we will only need to produce 30-40 rockets throughout the year,” he said.

While there is no hard estimate, market estimates say SpaceX spent just over $1 million to improve the booster stage of its reusable rocket. India has never tried reusable booster stages and there are no cost estimates for the same so far.

Challenging launches

Going forward, the executive believes there will be enough demand for such a reusable rocket to be launched 100 times a year, even as Agnikul competes with Hindustan Aeronautics and fellow startup Skyroot Aerospace for satellite customers in India who want to travel to space on small rockets.

India’s space economy is expected to generate $3.5 billion in annual revenue from rocket launches by 2033, according to data from India’s National Space Promotion and Authorization Center (In-Space), the nodal space agency led by Pawan Goenka.

However, this revenue comes from Agnikul, Skyroot, HAL and the Centre-backed NewSpace India Ltd, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro). will be shared among them. On October 28, in an interview with MintSkyroot chief Pawan Kumar Chandana said the company could generate up to $5 million in revenue from a single commercial launch. A rocket launch will be possible every month until 2027.

Stakeholders believe that Agnikul is quite differentiated on paper for now, but the important thing is to prove its mettle in the skies.

“While the success in terms of technical and operational requirements to achieve such a vision is quite high, in my opinion we should not underestimate the market risk, which is the larger of the two. Given that the industry is predominantly moving towards standalone satellites built by private companies, it is an obvious question for the launch question to follow,” said Narayan Prasad Nagendra, chief operating officer of Dutch space services company Satsearch.