Agnikul looking at 35-40 commercial launches a year, aiming to become best company for any sort of space transportation: Co-founder
Having successfully test-fired its first rocket a couple of weeks ago, Agnikul Cosmos, a private space company incubated at IIT Madras, aims for 35-40 commercial launches a year in a few years’ time. Agnikul became the second private company from India to test its rocket successfully, and the first one to fly it from its own launch pad on May 30.
The company claims to be the first in the world to have used an entirely 3-D printed cryogenic engine to power its rocket, different versions of which can carry payloads between 30 kg and 300 kg to the lower earth orbits.
In an interview with The Indian Express, conducted before the successful launch on May 30, Srinath Ravichandran, co-founder of Agnikul, spoke about his company’s vision to emerge as one of the best firms for any space transportation. Ravichandran talked about the immense opportunities for private Indian industry in the international space market but said the private sector was not yet at a technological maturity where it could begin to contribute meaningfully to ISRO missions.
Q. Agnikul is not the first private Indian company to fly its rocket. Skyroot has done it earlier. Why is your launch still significant?
Srinath Ravichandran: Yes, Skyroot was the first private company to launch a rocket. But there are some meaningful differences between their launch and our launch. They did a lot of things right. They proved that it was possible to do a private flight from India. They demonstrated a big policy victory which was good for all of us. Our launch builds upon that policy victory and adds a few technological nuances required to take the rocket into orbital space.
Our launch is also only a technology demonstrator, a test flight, to show that we can launch commercial flights.
Our rocket runs on our own semi-cryogenic engine, designed, manufactured, and tested in-house, and launches from our own launch pad. It validates many technologies and capabilities. It also ticks many checkboxes, especially regarding working closely with ISRO. When we launch commercially, we can say that each part of the launching procedure has been tested and validated in this test flight.
Q. You have named your rocket Agniban. How much weight can it carry to space?
Srinath Ravichandran: Agniban is scalable to carry payloads between 30 kg and 300 kg for commercial launches. This would be targeting the small satellite market.
Q. So you will be directly competing with the SSLV (small satellite launch vehicle) being developed by ISRO?
Srinath Ravichandran: Not really, because our capacity is lower than the lowest capacity of SSLV (meant to carry 300 kg to 500 kg satellites). We believe we are filling a gap in the country concerning the launch of small satellites. ISRO has SSLV, PSLV and GSLV, but no vehicle caters to satellites below the capacity of SSLV.
Q. How big is the demand for small satellites?
Srinath Ravichandran: If we talk about tonnes-to-orbit for satellites less than 500 kg in weight, about 50 to 60 tonnes are being taken to orbit annually. Now, if a vehicle like Agniban takes a payload of about 200 kg on average in a single flight, we are talking about 200 to 300 launches every year. And this is just to meet the current demand. Going forward, the demand is going to increase. We are looking at maybe 100 tonnes to orbit every year very soon.
So, for Agniban, even at a very ambitious goal of doing a launch every week, we would be doing about 50 launches a year. At an average payload capacity of 200 kg, we would be carrying only about 10 tonnes. There is plenty of room available.
Q. Are you aiming for that kind of frequency, a launch every week?
Srinath Ravichandran: That would be ideal. A launch every week or once in ten days. We are targeting about 35-40 launches a year. I think that kind of number makes a lot of sense for us. Even if we do about 100 kg of payload in a single flight on average, we are looking at carrying about 3.5 to 4 tonnes to orbit every year, which, I think, is a decent number to target.
Q. Is Agniban a reusable vehicle?
Srinath Ravichandran: The vehicle can do it. There is some mass budget available to put on the hardware that will get the vehicle back to earth. We will, at some point, attempt to make it reusable. There is a lot of sense in attempting reusability. There is a direct savings in cost, unless, of course, if we are using very small rockets. That is because reusability is not free. One must give up some payload capacity or revenue potential to get the rocket back.
If you put on additional mass in the form of hardware, that additional mass would reduce the payload capacity.
A reusable Agniban can carry payloads up to 225 kg instead of 300 kg, which is lost revenue. Now, we have to see whether we are saving enough from getting the rocket back to compensate for that loss. It might not make sense for very small vehicles, but it might be a good idea for our own vehicle, with payloads in the range of 250-300 kg.
Q. Where is the demand for launching small satellites coming from?
Srinath Ravichandran: It is mainly from the imaging and communications applications. It is all about taking photographs of the earth, but there are so many different dimensions to it. People want imagery in different wavelengths, resolutions, and frame sizes; the swathes or the areas they want to be covered are different. How often one wants to observe a particular area can be different. There are so many different options. So it is not just about putting a camera in space. It is about putting a bunch of cameras with different sorts of customisations.
The second set of demands is from communications companies. Gone are the days when communications satellites were put up far away in geostationary orbits. Nowadays, most companies are sending smaller satellites to lower Earth orbits. When it is closer to the earth, the satellite zips past at great speeds. It is not stationary over one particular area, as in the case of geostationary orbits.
Companies are compensating for that by sending constellations of hundreds of satellites. As far as any particular point on the earth is concerned, there is always a satellite to look up to. This is increasingly becoming the trend. Most of the leading telecommunications companies are looking at small satellites to do their job.
Q. But these large constellations very close to the earth are considered a nuisance by the astronomy community. They say it is crowding their view of the universe, and affecting their observations.
Srinath Ravichandran: Of course, we will have to be responsible and develop standard de-orbiting protocols. There will eventually be a method for stacking satellites in space. However, space is very large, and we are still in the early stages of developing standard protocols. It is good that these problems are being flagged at this early stage because suitable regulations will also evolve simultaneously.
More and more companies are acknowledging that space is not a dumping space for satellites. Protocols are being developed about how long a satellite should be in space, and when it needs to be brought down. Going forward, we will see more and more of the replacement of satellites rather than additions. Many small satellites going up even today are meant to be replaced after two to three years. It also allows companies to upgrade their technologies and make their satellites more compact, lighter and sturdy.
Q. How do you see your company, Agnikul, evolving in the next five to ten years?
Srinath Ravichandran: We are in the business of developing tools that would enable all sorts of space transportation. Agniban is our first product, but Agniban is not who we are. Agniban is one way we can bring the tools we have built together. More than the Agniban, it is the tools that we have built, a sort of library that we have developed, that will help us put together different kinds of space transportation solutions, like an orbital platform or a thing that can do in-orbit servicing.
We want Agnikul to develop into one of the best companies, hopefully, the best company, for any sort of space transportation. We would like to be the go-to guys for any transport solution for space. Hopefully, we will get there.
Q. You are using a 3-D printed engine for your rocket? How does that help? Is that how rocket engines will be manufactured in the future?
Srinath Ravichandran: The core concept of what a rocket engine does, of course, remains the same. The difference is in how it is manufactured, and in most situations, this would be more cost-effective and efficient. We believe that engine making in the future will become a fairly automated process.
Q. But how does it work? Do you have to test only one engine because the rest all have come from the same assembly line?
Srinath Ravichandran: No, every engine's individual acceptance test must be carried out. That is essential. The 3-D printed engine does not have any moving parts. It is one composite whole made in one go. There are no joints, no welding, no assembly. The complexity involved in assembling an engine with multiple parts is enormous. The engine goes through a lot. It operates at very high temperatures and very high pressures. Any joint, anything that you are sticking two things together, can be a potential source of error. 3-D printing makes the entire process more efficient and cost-effective.
For the latest news from across India, Political updates, Explainers, Sports News, Opinion, Entertainment Updates and more Top News, visit Indian Express. Subscribe to our award-winning Newsletter Download our App here Android & iOS