Hyderabad-based private space startup, Skyroot Aerospace, is set to launch its, and India’s first private rocket between November 12 and 16 from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Sriharikota launchpad. The rocket, named Vikram-S, will be the first space launch vehicle manufactured and operated entirely by a private company in the country — making this the first launch of its kind since the union government opened up the space sector for private industry participation in June 2020.

The final date of the launch mission will be confirmed depending on the prevalent weather conditions during the mentioned launch window. Naga Bharath Daka, chief operating officer of Skyroot, confirmed in a statement that the launch mission will be a suborbital spaceflight, and will carry three customer payloads to the intended orbit.

Typically, a suborbital spaceflight refers to a height of around 100km from the Earth surface, and is done at a lower altitude than an orbital flight, which reaches at least a low-Earth orbit — between around 200km to 2,000km from Earth.

China gave up on their SLS clone, deciding that building a giant rocket that blows up with every mission is a bad idea. Maybe Congress, who is forcing NASA to build the SLS, could learn from this.

When China started to get serious about sending its astronauts to the Moon in the middle of the last decade, the country’s senior rocket scientists began to plan a large booster to do the job.

In 2016 the country’s state-owned rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, began designing the “Long March 9” rocket. It looked more or less like the large heavy lifter NASA was designing at the time, the Space Launch System. Like NASA’s large rocket, the Long March 9 had a core stage and boosters and was intended to be fully expendable.