Propulsion
LX-1 Engine
LX-1 is our primary engine — ethanol/LOX, regeneratively cooled. We picked ethanol over kerosene after genuinely interrogating the trade, because it fits the mission profile we're building for.
Our Mission
Building India's First Reusable Small-Lift Rocket
Not a paper rocket. Not a rendering. A vehicle family we're testing, flying, and rebuilding — piece by piece, from a garage in Delhi to a launch pad.
India can put satellites in orbit. What it can't yet do is put small satellites in orbit cheap — reliably, on schedule, for under ₹40 crore. That gap is where SkyLakes lives.
We're building the SKYLX family — S, M, and H — a line of reusable small-lift launch vehicles designed to make sub-₹40Cr LEO access normal instead of exceptional. Not by out-funding the incumbents, but by out-testing them: cheaper iterations, faster failure, more flights per rupee.
Why This, Why Now
Open, legal, and almost entirely unbuilt
India's space sector just opened up. IN-SPACe exists. Private launch is legal, encouraged, and still almost entirely unbuilt. A handful of companies are chasing the top of the market — bigger payloads, bigger rockets, bigger checks. Almost nobody is building for the small satellite operators who need a ride to orbit and can't afford to wait in line behind a national mission.
That's the seat we're taking. Small-lift. Reusable. Priced for the customer who currently has no good option.
The gap we're built for
- Vehicle family
- SKYLX-S / M / H
- Primary engine
- LX-1 · Ethanol/LOX
- Reuse target
- Booster recovery
How We Build
Test-first, not paper-first
Every subsystem earns its place through hardware, not slides. Our LX-1 engine program didn't jump straight to a metal print — we ran a PLA-CF nozzle through water flow testing first, validating cooling channel geometry before committing to an expensive IN718 build. That's the philosophy end to end: de-risk cheap, commit expensive.
Avionics
STM32F411 + Pi Zero 2W
A dual flight-computer architecture, stress-tested through a formal bare-metal-vs-Linux evaluation protocol run in shadow mode — because the flight computer doesn't get a second chance to be right.
Simulation
SimCore
We're building SimCore, our own flight simulation platform, to eventually get us off MATLAB/Simulink entirely. If it's core to how we fly, we want to own it.
Design & Iteration
Fusion 360 · Blender · KeyShot
Every airframe and engine gets modeled, visualized, and pressure-tested digitally before it touches a test stand — iterated the same way we iterate hardware: fast, and without ego.
The Vehicle Family
One platform, three payload classes
Role
Small-lift entry point
Built for
Smallsat operators, first flights, technology demonstration.
Role
Mid-capacity workhorse
Built for
Constellation deployment, dedicated rideshare.
Role
Heavier LEO payloads
Built for
Larger payload classes as the platform matures.
The Roadmap
How we get there
We're not pretending a small team in Delhi ships a reusable orbital rocket on day one. So we're sequencing it honestly:
- 01
Build the community
Before SkyLakes builds rockets at scale, it's building the people who care about rockets — students, hobbyists, and engineers who show up, ask hard questions, and stay. This is that room.
- 02
Fund the mission with hardware people can hold
Model rocket kits and sub-components — real revenue from real products, not slide decks. It funds the harder problems and puts rocketry into more hands than a launch ever could on its own.
- 03
Commercial spaceflight
Everything above builds toward this: SKYLX-S, M, and H flying, reflying, and making sub-₹40Cr LEO access something India's smallsat operators can actually plan around.
Join The Mission
There's a place for you in this
Whether you're an engineer who wants to work the hard problems, a student who wants to learn by watching it happen in real time, or an operator who needs a smallsat in orbit for less — there's a place for you in this.
What we won't do
We won't claim a flight date we haven't earned with test data.
We won't skip the cheap test to look impressive faster.
We won't build this behind closed doors — the community sees the build logs, the failures, and the fixes.