Agnikul in talks with customers for orbital launch scheduled for end of FY25: COO Moin SPM

Moin SPM, Co-Founder & COO (L) & Srinath Ravichandran, Co-Founder & CEO, AgniKul Cosmos

After the successful launch of its Agnibaan SorTED rocket, Chennai-based space tech startup Agnikul Cosmos is already in talks with customers for its larger, orbital-scale launch, scheduled for end of FY2025, the startup's chief operating officer Moin SPM told Moneycontrol.

In a telephonic conversation with the publication, Moin said, "The orbital launch will be a developmental flight. Customers have already reached out to us, and we will be carrying payloads." It is only after the orbital flight, that Agnikul will commence commercial operations.

Agnibaan SorTED (suborbital technology demonstrator), is a suborbital rocket, which means that such launch vehicles may go into space, but then their path (or trajectory) carries them back to the earth. Skyroot's 2022 launch of Vikram-S was also suborbital.

Moin said that the SorTED rocket did not carry any customer payloads, other than payloads of ISRO such as flight termination system and so on.

In contrast, an orbital launch will carry Agnikul's Agnibaan orbital rocket into the low earth orbit, where it will put payloads into the space as per client's requirements.

Agnikul Cosmos on May 30 successfully launched the Agnibaan SOrTeD rocket from Sriharikota. Agnikul's launch on May 30 was their fifth attempt, with the startup aborting their launch the previous four times.

"We held back our launch. It was not a launch attempt. We have robust automated systems, which detected anomalies and gave command that the system is not doing properly," Moin said, while explaining why the startup held back their launches.

"It is definitely a big moment for all of us. More than the number of 'attempts', what matters is the time we spent behind developing this rocket," he added.

To put this into context, the startup's CEO in a 2022 interview with the publication had said that the company was then working on the suborbital launch, and had then scheduled it for March 2023.

The startup is now concentrating on the development of its orbital rocket. Sources said that the company will start commencing ground tests related to the rocket soon. "The energy in the team is infectious after this success," Moin said, adding that the team is raring to do more.

The startup was founded in 2017 by CEO Srinath Ravichandran, a Wall Street trader-turned-aerospace engineer, Moin SPM an operations specialist and Satyanarayanan Chakravarthy, a professor at IIT Madras.

Moin has a Bachelor’s degree in Aeronautics from Anna University, Chennai, and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the University of Newcastle, Australia. Prior to Agnikul, he led a contract manufacturing company in the CPG sector