India, July 21 -- On the morning of July 18, 2026, a seven-storey rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, climbed for roughly fifteen minutes, and placed several payloads into orbit some 450 kilometres above the Earth. The rocket was Vikram 1. The company that built it, Skyroot Aerospace, is not a government arm, not a legacy defence contractor, and not even a decade old. With this single launch, India became only the third country in the world, after the United States and China, where a privately built company has independently designed, constructed, and flown its own rocket into orbit.

It is worth sitting with that fact before moving on to the human story around it, because the number that matters most her...