He Quit ISRO to Build an "Illegal" Rocket Company: The Skyroot Story

For most of history, the world told India to stay in its lane — grow the food, run the factories, answer the phone calls, and leave the stars to the big boys. Pawan Kumar Chandana didn't get the memo. In 2018, he and his co-founder Bharath quit safe, respected jobs at ISRO to build Skyroot Aerospace — India's first private rocket company — at a time when it was still illegal for a private company to launch a rocket in the country. In a conversation with Think School, Chandana explains how that leap of faith became a company now aiming to compete with SpaceX.

This post condenses the episode. The claims and figures are Chandana's.

Starting a Company the Government Never Meant to Exist

When Chandana left ISRO, there was no policy allowing private rocket launches, no investment fund with a thesis for space, and essentially no space talent in the private sector. The odds looked terrible. But his reasoning flipped the problem on its head: "Building a rocket company is far easier when nothing is there. That's when you have to take the first step."

He understood it was a chicken-and-egg problem — the government had no incentive to open the sector until someone built the momentum to show there was commerce and benefit in it. So Skyroot started building anyway, became the first company to sign an MOU with ISRO for access to its test facilities, and waited for the rules to catch up. They did faster than expected: the enabling policy arrived in two to three years, not the decade Chandana had braced for. Today, he says, private space in India has attracted around $600 million in investment and created more than 5,000 high-tech jobs — most of it in just the last few years.

Why the Whole World Is Suddenly Racing to Space

Chandana frames the boom simply: demand exploded while cost collapsed. Communication satellites can now beam internet directly to billions, and earth-observation satellites feed analytics into industry after industry. Meanwhile, the cost curve looks like solar's — which fell from ₹200 per watt in 2010 to about ₹10 per watt in fifteen years — and rockets are following the same trajectory through reusability.

The deeper point is that launch cost is a foundational cost, like the price of internet bandwidth. Drop it from around $2,700 per kg toward $100 per kg, and entire industries that don't exist today become possible. His most striking example is AI data centers in space. In the right orbits, he explains, you get seven to eight times more energy per unit area, 24x7 solar exposure with no atmospheric filtering, no need for cooling water, and no land to acquire — and space itself is effectively unlimited. Once launch costs fall to a few hundred dollars per kg, he argues, compute in orbit could genuinely undercut compute on the ground.

The Frugal Genius of ISRO

Before Skyroot, there was ISRO — and Chandana speaks of it with reverence. It is, he says, India's only true deep-engineering organization, building rockets like PSLV, GSLV, and LVM3 entirely from scratch. Its record is staggering for its budget: the first country to reach Mars orbit on its very first attempt, the first to land near the Moon's south pole, and a program so frugal it reached Mars for less than the budget of the movie "The Martian." ISRO's entire cumulative budget, he notes, is smaller than a single year of NASA's.

What made that possible, in his telling, is the culture Vikram Sarabhai instilled: a "scientific temper" of obsessive attention to detail — where a single bolt can down a rocket — combined with the highest integrity, where failures are openly discussed and accepted as part of the process, a national spirit, and a frugality forced by scarce resources. Chandana was part of the LVM3 team, worked on the missions that carried India near the Moon's south pole, and fully intended to retire there — until a "lightning strike" of a thought hit him: why can't India have a private rocket company?

The Uber to Space

Skyroot's business is, in Chandana's words, "a logistics company to space." It launches rockets that carry satellites to orbit, and satellite companies pay for the ride. Those customers make their money through communications and through earth observation — a market he expects to reach $30 billion by the end of the decade.

And earth observation turns out to be astonishing. Chandana rattles off the applications: defense surveillance with radar satellites that see through clouds and darkness around the clock; precision agriculture using cameras so sensitive they detect 0.1-Kelvin temperature differences to tell a farmer exactly when and how much to irrigate — and can even spot pests from orbit; ISRO's "Potential Fishing Zones" that save fishermen billions in fuel; instant insurance payouts verified by imagery; and even home loans disbursed floor-by-floor as a satellite confirms each stage of construction.

Skyroot's specific niche is what he calls the "Uber to space." SpaceX and ISRO build big rockets — think trains and metros running hub-to-hub to the most popular orbits. Skyroot instead lets a customer book an entire small rocket to a custom orbit for maximum coverage, a premium service he says only one 20-year-old US company currently offers. It targets the sub-300kg small-satellite market — satellites having shrunk from room-sized to mini-fridge-sized, much as smartphones did — with a version scaling up to a one-ton payload.

Counterintuitively, he says, building a small rocket is harder than a big one. "Gravity is brutal" — you have to optimize in grams, with no room to add thickness or redundancy, whereas a big rocket lets you engineer in slack. But it was the right first step: a big rocket needs half a billion dollars to develop, while surviving the small-rocket journey prepares you to build big fast. At up to ₹100 crore per launch, twenty launches is ₹2,000 crore.

Raising Money by Googling It

Perhaps the most disarming part of the story is how Skyroot got funded. Chandana had the ambition but no money and, by his own admission, no idea how fundraising worked — he literally Googled "what is a term sheet," at first assuming an investment might be some kind of loan before learning it meant trading shares for capital. With no contacts at all, a friend cold-pinged Myntra and Cult.fit founder Mukesh Bansal on LinkedIn. Bansal replied immediately, met them in Bangalore the next day, and committed ₹10 crore in under an hour. The pitch, Chandana laughs, was essentially "nothing" — just two engineers quitting safe jobs to take a bold risk on India's strong fundamentals.

That episode captures his core belief about the industry: building a rocket is never a capital problem. "You can throw all the money in the world and never succeed." What matters is the founders — their energy, execution, and infectious passion. That's why Skyroot's early backers were all entrepreneurs, he says: you can't calculate the bet, so you back the people who'll pivot through any crisis. His proof point is Rocket Lab's Peter Beck — no formal education, from a country with no space program — who built one of the world's largest space companies in twenty years.

Open Space for All

Chandana closes with advice and a mission. To a 23-year-old, his message is to take the leap and start something, because India needs bold deep-tech founders building aircraft, drones, robotics, nuclear fusion, biotech, AI, and space — not just delivery apps and, as he puts it, "fancy ice creams." Education is now nearly free, he argues, between ChatGPT, Claude, and podcasts, and "the best people in the world are self-taught." He counts himself among them — a last-bencher who never really listened to teachers and instead went home to study "two or three layers deep" at his own pace, a habit he calls a superpower.

Skyroot's mission, he says, is to "open space for all." Space is only ten or fifteen minutes away, yet its benefits — pest detection for every farmer, high-speed internet for every remote home — remain locked behind cost. And in the longest view, he argues, becoming a space-faring civilization is the only way to scale humanity beyond a finite Earth. Notably, as the host points out, Chandana described that entire dream without mentioning a single number. Maybe, one day, people will say they saw Pawan build Skyroot the way they now say they saw Elon build SpaceX.

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Originally published on Think School. Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM42lU5Glp0