I thought the rocket was falling: Skyroot briefly lost contact with Vikram-1

Skyroot lost contact with Vikram-1 for nearly two minutes during its historic orbital mission. Skyroot founder recalls the tense moments in the Mission Control. The outage was traced to ground systems as the rocket stayed on course and reached orbit.Skyroot has already shifted its focus to the next Vikram mission. (Photo: Skyroot)Even as Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 made history by becoming India's first privately developed orbital launch vehicle to reach orbit, there was a tense two-minute period during the mission when engineers lost communication with the rocket, leaving the launch team fearing the worst.Speaking exclusively to IndiaToday.in, Skyroot Aerospace CEO and co-founder Pawan Chandana revealed that telemetry from the rocket was lost for nearly two minutes during the third stage of flight, briefly raising fears inside mission control that the vehicle had failed."For a moment, I thought the rocket was falling because the altitude wasn't increasing on our display," Chandana said. "Initially, we thought something had gone wrong with the rocket, but then we realised the graph had become a straight line because no new telemetry was coming in. We later received confirmation that it was a communication loss, not a problem with the vehicle."According to Pawan, the loss of communication was traced to the ground communication and tracking system, not the launch vehicle itself. "The ground station could not track the rocket, and we couldn't receive telemetry data for about two minutes. It had nothing to do with the launch vehicle or the onboard systems. We're investigating why it happened," he said.Despite the brief blackout, the rocket continued flying nominally, with its actual trajectory matching pre-flight predictions almost perfectly. "In every way, the mission was almost flawless. If you compare the predicted trajectory with the actual trajectory, it was a picture-perfect match with virtually no deviation," Chandana said.The launch team also encountered a brief hold before liftoff after a minor issue was detected in the ground checkout software. The glitch was resolved before launch and did not affect the rocket's onboard flight software.Another observation came during the third and fourth stage separation, when live camera footage appeared to show an unusual interaction between the stages."It looked like there could have been a collision, but our data confirms there was no collision," Chandana said. "We're still analysing why that disturbance occurred. The vehicle recovered immediately and successfully reached orbit, so it did not impact the mission, but it is something we need to understand before the next flight."He emphasised that the flight software performed flawlessly, with both the communication outage and the launch hold linked to ground systems rather than the rocket itself.Skyroot has already shifted its focus to the next Vikram mission. Chandana told India Today that preparations for the second launch are already underway.Whether it will be another test flight or the first fully commercial mission will depend on the findings of the detailed post-flight analysis, which is expected to be completed over the next few weeks."The analysis will tell us what improvements are needed. Based on that, we'll decide the exact nature of the second launch," he said, adding that every observation from Vikram-1 will be incorporated into future missions as Skyroot moves towards a regular launch cadence.- EndsPublished By: Sibu Kumar TripathiPublished On: Jul 31, 2026 15:51 IST