Space startup Skyroot Aerospace on Saturday launched India’s first privately developed orbital rocket, a key test of the country’s efforts to capture a larger share of the global commercial launch market.

The 22-meter Vikram-1 rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 0635 GMT, carrying several customer payloads and in-orbit experiments on its maiden orbital mission, dubbed “Mission Aagaman.”

It successfully injected its payload into a 450-kilometer orbit roughly 15 minutes later.

This makes India only the third country to achieve orbital launch capability through private enterprise.

Skyroot was founded in 2018 and India’s space sector was opened to private companies in 2020.

One could argue that it took six years from the sector's opening up to private entrants for a company run by entrepreneurs to raise capital, build a viable product, and successfully reach orbit.

While other space-tech ventures are quietly developing in offices and sheds across Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, but the launch of Vikram-1 is the newsmaking breakthrough the industry has been waiting for.

The question is whether this milestone could serve as a broader fillip and fresh reminder for private enterprise to drive the country’s economic growth.

The Steep Cost Of Delay

While the private sector has played an undeniable role and more so since the 1990s, the Indian state continues to exert a heavy operational hand in major industries, from steel and oil to power and defense.

Where sectors have opened up, assertively or in retreat, private capital in most cases has rushed in quickly and created globally competitive products or services. The examples are too many to enumerate.

This is not however a renewed call for aggressive disinvestment, a topic endlessly debated with limited action.

Nor is it meant to diminish the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) mighty contribution over the decades in building an indigenous space program.

Rather, it is about asking where else private enterprise can solve the biggest challenges facing India and its citizens.

It is also a necessary reminder of the steep cost of delaying private capital and the inevitable misallocation of public resources that follows.

We still see this across sectors, from airports to telecom, though the tide is slowly turning.

America's Head Start

Private participation in America’s space endeavors began in the 1960s with Telstar 1, a communications satellite launched on a rocket owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the independent agency established by President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1958.

ISRO was set up in 1969, superseding the Indian National Committee for Space Research established in 1962 by Dr Vikram A Sarabhai, the namesake of Saturday's rocket.

Looking back, the convergence and divergence in approaches is illustrative.

Both nations saw merit in joining the space race, started by the Soviet Union when it launched Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957.

But America opted for a mix of public and private partnerships to drive its response and program.

India stuck rigidly to the public sector, opening up to private players only some 50 years later, which is now.

Could India’s space program have advanced differently had the private sector played a front-facing role from the start, rather than, for instance, supplying components to it?

Perhaps.

But India was on a different economic trajectory then, with the state dominating most areas of life, and space was no exception.

And America of course embraced private enterprise across a much broader swathe of industries a century or more earlier.

Regulation, Risk, and Reward

Space offers a prime example of managing public and private interests through active government regulation.

It demonstrates that with sharp-sighted legislative oversight, the private sector can be simultaneously nurtured and effectively regulated.

Nuclear power also comes to mind.

While many countries operate privately run nuclear power stations, India has struggled to attract private capital to the sector, hampered by lack of policy and regulation.

From collecting garbage to manufacturing fighter jets, the role of Government in these areas deserves consistent and critical appraisal.

Having made the case for private enterprise, it must be acknowledged that private capital carries its own risks.

Consider the recent trajectory of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Since mid-June, its shares have tumbled from around $225 to $127, a drop of more than 40%, dragging it below its blockbuster IPO price.

Analysts attribute the latest selloff in the stock partly to a failed rocket launch.

While the stock may stabilise over the long term, it is a stark illustration of how markets punish failure.

But crucially, the risk and the financial pain are borne by Musk and his merry band of investors, not the US taxpayer.

Skyroot will inevitably face its own setbacks; such is the unforgiving nature of space exploration.

But when those disappointments come, the risk, rightly, will belong to private capital.