The Indigenous Liquid Rocket Engine Set to Lower India’s Launch Costs.
Abyom SpaceTech’s Liquid Rocket Engine.
Abyom SpaceTech Liquid Rocket Engine Testfire: For decades, getting to space was an exclusive club run by a handful of governments with massive budgets. If you wanted to launch a satellite, you built a giant rocket, flew it once, and let it burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the ocean.
But the global space race is changing fast. Led by companies like SpaceX, the international space industry has shifted toward reusable rockets—vehicles that can fly to space, land back on Earth, and fly again. This dramatically cuts down the cost of reaching orbit.
Now, a startup from Hyderabad has brought this game-changing technology home to India.
Abyom SpaceTech and Defence has successfully test-fired India’s first entirely homegrown, reusable liquid rocket engine. Developed without relying on foreign technology or expensive imported parts, this breakthrough could rewrite the economics of India’s commercial space sector.
The “BattleShip” Putting India in the Reusable Rocket Race
The heart of this breakthrough is the BattleShip Engine, or BSE-II. It belongs to a class of smaller, specialized liquid-propellant engines designed for precision work rather than launching heavy cargo ships.
To prove the engine could handle the violent environment of a rocket launch, the engineering team put it through a grueling testing cycle. The engine was fired more than 250 times. During these tests, internal temperatures soared past 2,200 degrees Celsius—hot enough to melt steel—yet the structure held strong.
Building a reusable engine isn’t just about surviving the heat; it’s about control. Unlike traditional rockets that simply fire at full blast until they run out of fuel, a reusable rocket needs to slow down, steer, and hover to touch down safely on a landing pad.
Abyom’s recent tests successfully proved the engine can throttle (turn its power up and down), ignite reliably via electronic controls, and maintain stable combustion. Every single piece of software and hardware used to run the engine was built in-house, securing a totally independent tech portfolio for the company.
From an Incubator to the Edge of Space
Abyom started its journey inside the technology incubator at the BITS Pilani Hyderabad campus. Today, the successful engine test serves as the foundation for an even bigger dream: a reusable rocket prototype named HOPE (Hybrid Orbital Propulsion Engineering).
By mastering vertical landing and automated guidance, the company plans to build a fleet of affordable, small rockets. These won’t just launch commercial small satellites; they are being designed for rapid defense operations, weather data collection, and short science experiments just above the Kármán line—the boundary where Earth ends and space begins.
The company’s next step is to scale this technology into high-power cryogenic engines, which use super-chilled liquid fuels, and build the automated launchpads needed to start sending missions into orbit.
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Lowering the Barrier for Everyone Else
Building a rocket engine is hard, but testing it can be even harder. Testing facilities are incredibly expensive, often putting them out of reach for students, researchers, and early-stage startups.
Abyom wants to fix that. The company is turning its compact, container-style testing facility in Hyderabad into an open platform. This means Indian universities, independent engineering teams, and other startups will be able to rent the facility to test their own designs without needing millions of dollars in upfront capital.
Fueling a $13 Billion Economy
India’s private space economy is projected to boom to $13 billion by 2030, fueled by a wave of private innovation. Abyom’s success—backed by support from India’s Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and IT, and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)—signals that India’s private sector is ready to build sovereign space tech.
As Jainul Abedin, founder and CEO of Abyom, points out, this milestone is about anchoring an independent manufacturing base for reusable rockets right here in India. With Hyderabad rapidly becoming a hub for defense and deep-tech engineering, the country is proving it doesn’t just want to participate in the modern space race—it wants to lead it by making space travel frequent, reliable, and affordable.
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