Modi Unveils Vikram-I and 200,000-sq-ft Infinity Campus, Launching India’s Private Orbital Era

Private rockets are hardly new—SpaceX’s Falcon 1 reached orbit in 2008—but national transitions from state to market control often come in fits: the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Act (1984) or Russia’s 1990s Energia spin-offs each took a decade to move beyond ceremonial roll-outs. India’s own shift echoes its 1983 auto liberalisation, where Maruti Suzuki transformed a state-run niche into a global export base within 20 years. By giving a startup access to ISRO test ranges and openly praising Gen-Z engineers, New Delhi is betting that competitive manufacturing, not budget launches, will anchor its next-generation geostrategic leverage. The announcement matters because launch cadence—one rocket a month, if achieved—could drop global small-sat costs and pull supply chains to South Asia, altering the industrial geography of space for the rest of the century. Skeptics will note the harder milestone—the first paid orbital flight slated for early 2026—has yet to occur, and history shows rhetoric often outpaces rockets; still, if India sustains policy continuity, this week could read like the 1958 founding of NASA: a bureaucratic pivot whose real consequences became clear only decades later.