Can India find its own Starlink moment?

On August 21, two days before National Space Day, the founders of 20 space startups, including Skyroot, Agnikul, Pixxel, Dhruva Space, Bellatrix, Digantara and GalaxEye, gathered at Seva Teerth in New Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The meeting offered a snapshot of how far India’s private space industry had come: from an idea to orbit.

It began as a working session, with actual hardware on the table. Dhruva Space showcased its P-30 platform and ground station antenna; Digantara displayed its second-generation optical payload. Around the table, the conversation turned to scale: from one rocket a month to one a week, and eventually several launches a day.

The ambition is clear, but scale poses a difficult question: who will buy what India’s space companies are building, and at what price?

The customer base is thin—India’s space industry remains heavily dependent on government demand, with Isro still the primary local anchor—leaving most of the country’s $8.4-billion space industry dependent on overseas orders. Skyroot, for instance, expects two-thirds of its demand to come from overseas.

However, the export pitch is not so straightforward. Among major spacefaring nations, India’s average launch cost per kg is the highest, because Indian rockets are expendable and fly only a handful of times a year.

A recent study by economists Alessio Terzi of the University of Cambridge and Francesco Nicoli of Politecnico di Torino estimated India’s 2025 cost of delivering a kg of payload capacity to low-Earth orbit at $13,302—the highest among the six spacefaring regions it studied. The estimate is modelled from public cost data (government reports, academic papers, public documentation) standardised to 2024 dollars. The model uses launch vehicles’ rated capacity, not the payload actually flown.

India’s cost was more than four times the US’s $3,225, and much higher than Europe’s $9,897, Russia’s $6,682, China’s $5,809 and Japan’s $5,287.

Even as India’s private space industry has made remarkable progress on the hardest engineering problems, the harder test now is commercial.

According to Yashas Karanam, co-founder and COO of Bengaluru-based Bellatrix Aerospace, India has close to zero of the global commercial space market today and about 2% of the overall global market, which could reach 8-10% within a couple of years if this cohort of start-ups reaches commercialisation.

In pursuit of a market

The meeting with the prime minister came against the backdrop of the best year yet for India’s private space industry: the first unicorn in Skyroot, the first private orbital launch in Vikram-1, record fundraising—private investment in the sector has risen nearly three-fold since 2024, to $349 million by September 2026, according to Venture Intelligence—and two new government schemes.

But behind the milestones sits an uncomfortable reality. Before the sector opened to private participation in 2020, Isro was the only anchor for India’s space industry. There was no private market. That has not changed much.

In the early 2010s, Rohan Ganapathy and his mates at Coimbatore’s Hindusthan College of Engineering & Technology were experimenting with a water-based electric thruster for small satellites as a student project. The turning point came when the then Isro Chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar saw their test results and asked them to present to Isro. The presentation led to the first order for the thruster. To fulfil that order, Ganapathy and his co-founders, including Karanam, incorporated Bellatrix Aerospace in 2015. However, over the next decade, Bellatrix found that both its suppliers and customers were outside India. Importing parts, integrating and testing them at home, then selling the finished product back to Europe or the US was not sustainable. So it started building propulsion systems in-house.

“Most of our money is coming from export orders right now, and we are in the process of scaling up manufacturing,” says Karanam, adding that Bellatrix’s goal is to become the world’s number one or two propulsion supplier through vertical integration.

Bellatrix designs and tests its systems at its headquarters in Bengaluru and a propulsion lab at the Indian Institute of Science, and has a capacity for 250–300 systems a year. It plans to build a $76-million factory on a five-acre site at the KIADB Aerospace Park near Bengaluru airport. Karanam says doubling capacity again will take around $100 million.

Bengaluru-based Pixxel went through a similar experience. When the hyperspectral earth observation company started in 2019, it set up an entity in the US alongside the one in India.

“That’s where the budgets were. We had opportunities in the US and Germany, which were countries that would give you licences if you set up some local presence there,” says co-founder and CEO Awais Ahmed. “The first thing for any space company to do is get paying customers, so that you can sustain yourself through revenues and not from raising financing.”

With funding scarce at the time, Pixxel had to earn its way on revenue, and the customers were abroad. “India has opened up, but (it is) still fairly early. The US and Europe have the numbers, much larger budgets for space, even in defence and intelligence,” says Ahmed.

Going global forced a harder question: how does a small Indian player win against bigger, better-funded rivals? Pixxel’s answer was to avoid competing on price at all.

“Our thinking was: where is the gap that we can fill where we don’t have to compete on price?” says Ahmed. That gap was found in hyperspectral imaging, which captures data across narrow wavelengths of light, including ranges invisible to the human eye.

US space agency NASA launched its first hyperspectral imaging satellite back in 2000, but it was decommissioned in 2017. Pixxel moved to fill that gap.

“We started providing a data set that shows things to people they can’t see otherwise,” Ahmed says. The bet paid off. “We ended up signing a contract with NASA and NRO (US National Reconnaissance Office). And that was the vindication. Build something so unique that people anywhere will pay a premium for it.”

Finding customers, however, is only the first step. The harder part is generating enough repeat demand to build a market.

For most Indian companies, the value of space data remains difficult to translate into an immediate business case, say experts. Take agricultural lending. Satellite imagery can show what is happening to a crop, but the commercial prospect hinges on whether a lender can act on the information—expand lending, price risk better, cut defaults—by enough to justify paying for the data.

The same problem appears in infrastructure: a satellite can spot changes across thousands of kilometres of roads, pipelines or construction sites, but turning that insight into a recurring contract requires proving that acting on the information saves the customer more money than the cost of the data.

The ecosystem, as a result, is stuck in a chicken-and-egg loop. Customers are reluctant to build new workflows around satellite intelligence before its value is proven; but space companies need customers to generate the revenue and data needed to prove that value. Until that cycle is broken, government and foreign customers will remain the industry’s deepest pockets.

To be sure, companies are waking up to the value of space data. Reliance Jio, for example, is exploring a sovereign satellite constellation; Airtel is integrating satellite connectivity into its telecom business; and banks and insurers are beginning to use satellite intelligence for agricultural lending and risk. However, these markets are still narrow, concentrated and emerging.

This creates a second bottleneck: growth capital. Start-ups need larger cheques as they move from prototypes to production, yet the funding pattern in Indian spacetech has been dominated by early-stage capital. Only two commercial space companies—Skyroot Aerospace and Pixxel—have been able to raise more than $100 million. Experts say capital is difficult to raise without visibility on future revenues. And revenue visibility, in turn, depends on having anchor customers.

Anirudh Sharma, founder and CEO of domain awareness startup Digantara, points to SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk.

“Even before SpaceX launched the Falcon, they had contracts from NASA, from defence. We don’t yet have that established mechanism to win contracts at a developmental stage,” he says. “Today, all the development needs to be funded internally.”

The government has become an “anchor customer”, he says, but it is not yet consistently acting as a developmental partner that commits to buying a technology before it is proven. When a government commits to buying 30 or 40 systems once the first one works, a company can build its factory, hire engineers and raise capital against plausible future revenue. However, if there is commitment for only one system, the economics don’t work. “We don’t need grants at this point in time,” Sharma says. “We need orders, contracts to develop capacity for the country.”

In some sectors, such as defence, it is already underway. In 2024, the Cabinet Committee on Security headed by PM Modi approved Rs 26,968 crore for Phase III of the space-based surveillance mission, aimed at improving land and maritime domain awareness for civilian and military applications. Under the programme, a constellation of 52 satellites is scheduled to be deployed by 2029, of which 31 are to be built by private space companies.

Then, in January this year, IN-SPACe, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, an interface between the government and private space companies, signed an agreement with Allied Orbits, a consortium led by Pixxel and including Dhruva Space, PierSight and SatSure, for the country’s first indigenous, fully commercial Earth-observation constellation under the public-private partnership framework. The consortium will build, own and operate 12 satellites, investing more than Rs 1,200 crore, with the network scheduled to be operational by 2029.

These are still early days, but the direction is clear. SpaceX has already shown how government contracts can help a space company build the capabilities and scale to become a commercial business. It is SpaceX that these founders most want to emulate, which, ironically, is also their biggest competitor globally.

The (Space)X factor

When Bellatrix’s founders were starting out, they considered building launch vehicles themselves. Then SpaceX demonstrated reusability—the first Falcon 9 booster landing in 2015, the first reflight in 2017—and the economics of the industry shifted overnight.

Karanam watched a wave of companies raise funds to build small rockets and eventually decided to focus on propulsion instead. “That’s when we realised, since SpaceX is building reusable launch vehicles, companies which have raised like $50 million each, most of them are going out of business,” says Karanam. “So that’s when we thought, let us not do both launch vehicles and propulsion, let us stick to just propulsion.”

In the era before reusability, a single launch could cost tens of millions of dollars. Falcon 9 pushed costs towards roughly $2,500–3,000 per kg, says Digantara’s Sharma. “If that wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think we would have had any company launching satellites today,” Sharma says.

And SpaceX is just getting started. It listed in June in the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion and entering the public markets at a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. Last year, SpaceX reported $18.7 billion in total revenue, of which $11.4 billion came from its satellite internet constellation Starlink. In comparison, India’s entire space economy is valued at around $8.4 billion, expected to grow to $44 billion by 2033.

There is good reason for the difference. In 2025, SpaceX launched 165 times, or one Falcon 9 flight every 2.2 days through the year, data from Space.com showed. That was nearly twice China’s national output and accounted for more than 80% of all US launches. SpaceX now holds more than 80% of the global commercial launch market by mass to orbit.

The market could see another reset from Starship, SpaceX’s fully reusable super-heavy rocket. On September 28, on its 14th test flight, it reached orbit for the first time, despite an engine failure that cut the mission short. It deployed 26 next-generation Starlink satellites, which SpaceX said added as much network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 flights.

SpaceX has not disclosed what the flight cost, so the economics remain unproven. But in its IPO filing, SpaceX said the first Falcon 9 cut launch costs to about $2,700 per kg in 2010, against a historical average of $18,500. With Starship, it aims to cut that average by 99%. That would make the economics of small launch vehicles difficult to defend.

That’s not all. By August, SpaceX had secured more than $8 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2026 alone. The response from Indian launch companies is to find another edge. Chennai-based Agnikul, for example, is attempting to bring reusability to the small-launch segment, while Bengaluru-based EtherealX is building a fully reusable medium-lift rocket aimed at the Falcon 9 class. For others, the answer is to build capabilities that India cannot afford to source elsewhere. “We do not believe the right strategy is to build a smaller version of SpaceX,” says Immanuel Louis, Co-founder and COO of Pune-based Astrophel Aerospace. “SpaceX solved a particular problem at a global scale, but India still requires sovereign, locally manufactured and responsive space infrastructure.”

Pixxel’s Ahmed agrees: “Let’s say, I want to get a detector from a foreign country, and for whatever reason geopolitically, the relationships go down. You don’t want to be waiting for the detector,” he says.

War and space

In 2019, when Digantara was still in incubation, it presented a concept for using LiDAR to track space objects at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, uses pulses of laser light to measure the distance and movement of objects.

At the time, space surveillance was largely controlled by governments, and private participation was minimal. Buoyed by people’s interest in the project, a clear gap in the market, and a Rs 25 lakh grant from the Indian Institute of Science, Digantara finally launched as a business in 2020 as a space domain awareness company. In simpler words, it was a space traffic management company, tracking debris and objects that could damage satellites. There were roughly 2,500 satellites in orbit. Their pitch deck talked about navigational safety and protecting satellite operators from collisions.

Then the world changed. As the conflicts in Ukraine and then Iran unfolded, Sharma watched the global space industry pivot.

“All of these conflicts led us to evolving as a defence company. That’s when we figured out our go-to-market,” says Sharma. “You’ve seen companies in earth observation that initially started as commercial observation companies, but today they’re heavily into defence, and all the data they generate from orbit goes to intelligence agencies — because they have more willingness to pay, and there is a pathway. The demand is already created.” Digantara pivoted from space situational awareness to a space surveillance and intelligence company.

“If you map out the economic activity in the space industry, 70% of revenue is coming from government and defence for all companies, regardless of what they do, and 30% is coming from commercial customers and other businesses,” says Sharma. “Unless you do something which can directly impact an individual’s life—like Starlink providing internet to consumers—you’re doing B-to-G or B-to-B.”

Then Starlink became SpaceX’s own captive customer, generating a steady need to put satellites into orbit. That demand allowed SpaceX to fly frequently, build launch cadence and spread costs over a much larger number of missions, helping other companies to send their payloads into orbit, eventually bringing down the cost of launch.

India doesn’t have an equivalent captive customer. Its launch companies need demand to achieve the scale that would make their rockets economical, but the market is too small to provide anything like Starlink’s stream of satellite orders. That leaves them with two broad routes to commercial scale: find a market abroad or help create enough demand at home.

The first means competing globally. “But a smaller Indian company cannot simply offer the same product as a better-funded American or European rival and expect customers to switch,” says Radha Krishna Kavuluru, a former scientist at Isro and a spacetech entrepreneur. “There are essentially two ways to win a global customer: be dramatically cheaper, or offer something sufficiently different that price is no longer the deciding factor.”

Finland’s ICEYE illustrates the second route. By putting synthetic-aperture radar into small satellites, it created a capability that had traditionally required much larger spacecraft. The differentiation gave customers a reason to buy its data, rather than simply choose a cheaper version of a product.

The alternative is to build the market at home. There are already pieces in the pipeline: Reliance Jio’s plan for a sovereign satellite constellation and government’s space surveillance mission are some examples. The largest is satellite broadband, where global players, including SpaceX’s Starlink, are waiting to launch in India.

But companies need visibility beyond the programmes and tenders already on the table. “If the government knows it will need particular capabilities several years from now, publishing that direction could allow companies to develop the technologies and manufacturing capacity before orders arrive,” says Kavuluru.

Companies need enough predictable demand to invest, build capacity and keep selling. The question is not simply whether India can produce another Skyroot, Pixxel or Digantara. It is whether the country can create the conditions under which these companies have enough demand to keep building, flying and selling. SpaceX had NASA first and Starlink later. India will need to find its own Starlink moment.