Pawan Chandana: The IIT Graduate Who Left ISRO to Build India's First Private Orbital Rocket

Pawan Kumar Chandana once barely passed a mathematics exam scoring 51 out of 100 which was just enough to not fail, not enough to feel anything but ashamed. That boy from Hyderabad is now 34, and on Saturday morning he will stand at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and watch a rocket he built attempt to reach orbit.

The mathematics involved are orbital mechanics, thrust vectors, staging sequences which is among the most complex ever computed on Indian soil. If there is a more complete personal turnaround in Indian entrepreneurial history, it is hard to think of one.

From Fear to Flight

Chandana was born in 1991 in Hyderabad, Telangana. School was not kind to him, particularly the subject that would eventually consume his life. His father was unwilling to accept that his son had a ceiling as he enrolled him in IIT coaching classes. Something shifted inside those sessions as the fear of numbers, he has said, turned into a fascination with them.

He cleared the IIT entrance examination on his first attempt and enrolled at IIT Kharagpur in 2007, completing a dual BTech-MTech in Mechanical Engineering while his classmates positioned themselves for high-paying jobs abroad.

Meanwhile, his mind, by then, had already decided: it wanted rockets.

Six Years to ISRO

Subsequently, in 2012, Chandana joined ISRO straight out of college at a modest salary. But, the work was not. Over nearly six years at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, he worked on the GSLV Mk-III — India's heaviest launch vehicle — the S-200 solid booster for GSLV Mk-II, and later became deputy project manager for the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle. An internal innovation award followed in 2016.

By any measure, he was building exactly the career he had set out to build. Though, an idea kept returning. A private space company in India. At the time the thought took root, the Indian law did not permit it.

LinkedIn Message That Started Everything

Chandana quit ISRO in 2018 with no business background, no investor network, and no guarantee that the regulatory environment would change in time to make his idea viable. What he had was an IIT Kharagpur alumni directory and a LinkedIn account.

He sent a cold message to Mukesh Bansal, who is the founder of Myntra, CureFit, and NuRX, and a fellow IIT Kharagpur graduate and asked for a meeting. Bansal took the bet, putting in $1.5 million. Then the pandemic arrived and froze further funding at precisely the moment Chandana needed momentum.

Meanwhile, the founders of renewable energy company Greenko stepped in to keep the company alive.

In June 2018, Chandana and fellow ISRO engineer Naga Bharath Daka formally co-founded Skyroot Aerospace in Hyderabad. In July 2020, two years later, the company built and tested the Raman-1 named after Nobel laureate C.V. Raman and becoming the first private Indian firm to fire a rocket engine. It was a small milestone by global standards. In India, it was a first.

When the Door Opened

When India opened its space sector to private players in 2021, Skyroot was first through the door, signing an MoU with ISRO and raising $51 million in what was then India's largest deep-tech funding round. The credibility it had built through years of technical work and not pitch decks which made that fundraise possible.

On November 18, 2022, Vikram-S lifted off from Sriharikota on “Mission Prarambh” which was India's first privately built suborbital rocket, reaching an altitude of 90 kilometres. Prime Minister Modi later inaugurated Skyroot's new manufacturing facility. The company had by then grown to nearly 1,000 employees and built what is now the country's largest private rocket-making unit.

Mission Aagaman

Saturday's launch is the next, a larger step. Vikram-1 is a four-stage rocket capable of placing up to 350 kilograms into orbit and will attempt to reach a 450-kilometre Low Earth Orbit at a 60-degree inclination, carrying technology demonstrators from Grahaa Space, Cosmoserve, DCubed and Skyroot's own SCOPE experiment.

Also on board: Prime Minister Modi's handwritten postcard reading "Vande Mataram," messages from ISRO chairmen, Indian astronauts, and the people who built the rocket. And a piece of micro-art, because Chandana has never seen any reason why a rocket cannot carry something personal.

If Vikram-1 reaches orbit, Skyroot will join an exclusive group of private companies capable of regular orbital launches — currently led by SpaceX in the United States and Rocket Lab in New Zealand. For a 34-year-old from Hyderabad who once needed coaching classes to pass a mathematics exam, it would be a fairly significant correction.

"We have done everything that could be done to test Vikram-1 on the ground," Chandana said this week. "On July 18, we are eager to see how Vikram-1 performs in the real flight environment for the first time."

The answer comes Saturday morning at 11:30.