Hyderabad: Telangana’s Industries and Commerce Minister K.T. Rama Rao expressed happiness that India’s first Integrated Rocket Design, Manufacturing and Testing Facility, by Skyroot Aerospace’s facility, will be based in Telangana.

KTR said that he promised the startup’s Co-Founders Pawan Chandana and Bharath Daka of complete support for establishing the facility to design, manufacture, and test rockets in Telangana.

The Minister participated as Guest of Honour at a programme organized at T-Hub on Friday to celebrate Skyroot Aerospace’s successful launch of Vikram-S rocket. The Hyderabad based startup, incubated at T-Hub, and supported by TWorks launched India’s first private rocket on November 18, 2022.

Congratulating the team which endured hardships, he expressed pride and happiness that a spacetech company from Hyderabad, India, broke all the barriers. KTR said that only a few companies across the world aced rocket science and achieved success in the first go. The launch was a truly historic moment.

Recalling his visit to a museum at Suzuki’s Headquarters in Japan where a bunch of school kids were on a tour, KTR said that there was a vending machine where children can customize toy cars by selecting car, colour, name, make and other aspects.

He said that the process teaches the young minds how to make a car, customize it. Design innovation was taught to the children in a subtle and indirect fashion, which people do not typically inculcate from a young age. He said that if fascination with design thinking is developed from childhood, people would gravitate towards it, which is missing in our system.

The Minister said that he would be thrilled to see Hyderabad as a Spacetech capital of India, and recalled that the State government already launched a Space Tech Policy.

He conveyed best wishes to Dhruva Space, another spacetech startup based in Hyderabad, which would launch two satellites on Saturday.