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

New Delhi: Chennai-headquartered Agnikul Cosmos, one of India’s two private rocket-making startups, is looking to conduct 100 rocket launches of its reusable rocket within the next five years. However, the company isn’t cloning Elon Musk’s approach to achieve this goal, and instead believes it can work with clients to make its rockets profitable within the next two years.

In an interview with Mint, Srinath Ravichandran, cofounder and chief executive of Agnikul Cosmos, said that the company is ‘very likely’ to make its first commercial reusable rocket launch in the coming year itself.

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

At the heart of Agnikul’s efforts is its reusable rockets pitch. On 22 November, the company raised $17 million in a Series C funding round at a valuation of $500 million. The company raised its latest capital based on its efforts to build a fully 3D-printed reusable two-stage rocket, Agnibaan.

“We will look to make the booster stage of our rocket (the part that carries the rocket’s engine) land vertically on a barge out in the ocean and recover it from there, in order to reuse it in future missions. But it’s not just this, we can also make our first stage (the main part of the rocket that carries the satellites) reusable by working closely with clients and offering the rocket’s first stage itself as the base of a satellite—thus utilizing every part of our rocket fully, and maximizing our revenue potential,” Ravichandran said.

Economic pivot

This, to be sure, is different from what Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which made the concept of reusable rockets a reality, is doing today. While SpaceX also recovers its booster stage to reuse launch engines and lower the cost of space missions, it also attempts to recover its first stage for even greater reusability.

“Such engineering requires massive capital, years of research, and is only feasible in large rockets working at a different scale altogether. We’re not trying to rival them, but bring reusability into the small rockets sector—for which we have already procured a global patent,” Ravichandran added.

Stakeholders of the space industry, however, have raised questions around whether reusability would be feasible for small rockets. Ravichandran’s Agnibaan, as well as the Vikram-I rocket at Chandana’s Skyroot, are all classified as small rockets, primarily targeting satellite launches to low-earth orbit, with an altitude of up to 500km from earth, carrying payloads of up to 500kg.

“While it’s true that reusability is great for larger rockets that are very expensive to build, there’s nothing that should stop Agnikul from building reusable rockets and proving that they can do it at scale. At the end of the day, if they can do it, they will establish a new cost structure and become a key stakeholder of the global small-rocket market—which is seeing participants increase around the world as well,” said Chaitanya Giri, space fellow at global think-tank, Observer Research Foundation.

Ravichandran, however, disagreed. “Our cost of launching a single mission is less than $2 million. At the current cost, my goal is that even at a small margin over and above this cost, we will be able to run a profitable rocket launch services business. Reusability will also reduce my cost of engineering and logistics—for instance, when we scale up to 100 launches a year, we’ll only have to manufacture 30-40 rockets through the year,” he said.

While there are no fixed projections, market estimates say SpaceX spends just over $1 million to recover the booster stage of its reusable rocket. India has never attempted reusable booster stages, and there are no cost estimates for it so far.

Challenging launches

Going forward, the executive believes there will be sufficient demand for such a reusable rocket to launch 100 times a year, even as Agnikul competes with Hindustan Aeronautics and fellow startup Skyroot Aerospace for satellite customers in India seeking a ride to space aboard small rockets.

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

This revenue, however, will be split across Agnikul, Skyroot, HAL and Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro) commercial arm, the Centre-backed NewSpace India Ltd. On 28 October, in an interview with Mint, Skyroot chief, Pawan Kumar Chandana, said that the company may generate up to $5 million in revenue from a single commercial launch. By 2027, it may conduct one rocket launch every month.

Stakeholders believe that while Agnikul has ample differentiation on paper for now, the key will be to prove its mettle in the sky.

“While the feat is quite tall in terms of technical and operational requirements to achieve such a vision, we must not discount the market risk, which, in my opinion, is bigger than the two. Given that the industry is moving heavily into sovereign satellites being built by private companies, the question of launch also following is an obvious one,” said Narayan Prasad Nagendra, chief operations officer of Dutch space services firm Satsearch.