India’s Space Ambition Needs A Larger Domestic Market: Bellatrix's Co-Founder Ganapathy

Anything to do with lower orbit or geocommunication satellites or Earth observation, industries are capable of taking it over. India's goal is to capture at least 20% of the $100bn global space market.

Isro [Indian Space research Organisation] has outlined a 10% target, but on the private side, 20% is realistic. Russia and China are also pioneers in space, but with the current geopolitics, there is more trust towards Indians.

So, we have an opportunity to capture more than 20%. But there are 400 companies in India. Is there a domestic demand for all 400? The answer is no. If you don't do anything, these industries will consolidate to maybe 25-30.

But if you increase domestic demand, when India becomes a supplier for global space companies and the government is also an anchor customer, the number of Indian companies will actually increase. The goal is to create as much domestic demand as possible.

The entrepreneurs these days are even more entrepreneurial. Digantara and Pixxel personally. I think their founders are more entrepreneurial and more aggressive.

We are all collaborators. We are not competing. I see spacetech as an ecosystem which is also very collaborative. When I talk to Pawan Chandana [Skyroot co-founder] and Srinath Ravichandran [Agnikul Cosmos co-founder], these guys actually complement each other. The market is still very small. You have to collectively grow it. No one company can bear the entire weight.

India's spacetech will survive and succeed only if there is sufficient domestic demand. Hundreds of things can go wrong. A rocket is launching, which is made up of a million parts. Even one part goes wrong, everything goes wrong. So, how do we mitigate that? We do extensive ground qualifications.

You simulate space, test all the harsh conditions, and then put the rocket into space. Here, you correct, learn from mistakes and make the product perfect.

But in case it fails, you need enough capital and the ability to try again. [SpaceX founder] Elon Musk's first three launches failed. They had money left for one final launch. The launch succeeded, and then [US space agency] Nasa gave them a big contract.

We have raised around $40mn so far, with around $20mn raised this year alone. When we started Bellatrix in 2015, nobody believed what we were doing. In 2015, we brought in private capital. Isro [Indian Space Research Organisation] gave us our very first order of ₹1cr.

But the question was not always about technology. It was about regulations. India was not a signatory to MTCR [Mission Technology Control Regime, a multilateral export-control regime], and there were restrictions around other international dual-use technology agreements. Only in 2016 did India become a signatory to MTCR. Then things changed. Back then, even the import of technology was not possible.

The challenges were that nothing was clearly written down and the regulations were not in place.

We were the only space start-up to have received an foreign direct investment. In 2019, we raised $3mn in pre-series A round, and subsequently $8mn in 2022 for our space propulsion project. Primarily, VC firms Inflection Point Ventures, which is still funding us, and GrowX came together and forwarded a small cheque.

It's easy to raise seed capital and Series A in India. But the challenge still remains for growth-stage funding, which we call Series B. At this stage, you have to demonstrate your product and product-market fit. You have to prove for people to buy. That is something India still has to develop. Less than five spacetech companies in India are in the growth stage. These are Skyroot, Agnikul, Bellatrix, Pixxel and Digantara.

Phase two of Bellatrix is where we are also building modular satellites, where people who focus on payload can attach their payload and fly. Instead of attacking a very crowded market, like low Earth orbit, we want to come further down, which we call VLEO.

Low-Earth orbit is somewhere between 500–900 km, where Starlink and everything operate. Our challenge is in VLEO—only 200km from the Earth's surface, which is not crowded.

At 200kms, atmospheric particles cause drag on your satellite and your orbit will decay in a couple of days. The solution is to constantly thrust. But you can't carry more fuel because it doesn't make economic sense. 

So, thanks to Bellatrix's expertise in electric propulsion, what we do is collect the nitrogen particles present in the upper atmosphere and convert this nitrogen into plasma. We accelerate this plasma out at a very high velocity. You get unlimited life because unlimited propellants are available there.

Since you are closer to Earth, your cameras get much better-resolution images. Since you're closer, communication latency drops. You can have more secure, faster communication. This orbit is also much lower, so the radiation is more benign. More commercial electronics rather than space-grade electronics will drive the cost of the satellite down. 

A satellite which costs $8–9mn can be done at $3–4mn. So, you can have more satellites and constellations. Globally, four or five companies are looking into this technology. Here in India, we are spearheading it. 

We have already signed on customers, both from defence as well as commercial. We are launching three satellites in December this year. At VLEO, this will be the first one going to 200-225kms.

It's also a myth that things are cheap here. Space—something goes wrong, you can't send anybody to go and repair it. So, it must work. There is nothing like 99% success. It is either zero or 100. The effort which goes into it is really a lot. 

Cost is basically manpower because naturally in India, the cost of manpower is lower. Every other thing is expensive because all your testing equipment, all your machinery, everything is imported. There is no local industry which is able to meet all these requirements. 

In space, most of the things we are just 5-10% less than global cost. Where we can be different is because we have a lot of resources available. The struggle basically is producing these things in numbers.

We have already signed orders worth ₹700cr, across propulsion as well as satellites. As of now, we are a propulsion company as a majority. Around 80% is coming from phase one, which is selling engines. Phase two has just begun. 

We don't know what the order book will be by 2030 because it can be wrong for us to speculate. But if you disrupt and see people like Reliance, Airtel and others in communication also coming to this orbit, the number would actually explode. 

Our challenge is how quickly we will be able to mobilise more capital to set up factories which can turn out satellites at faster numbers. Our factories can turn out to be around 200 systems a year. Now, we have to expand the capacity to make big satellites and set up new facilities.