Reflect Orbital’s team
| Photo Credit: By Arrangement
California startup Reflect Orbital, focused on developing space-enabled infrastructure to deliver sunlight at night to precise locations on earth, has booked two Skyroot Aerospace launches to deploy future spacecraft.
Dedicated launches such as these provide assured schedule and capacity and complement Reflect’s other planned launches from sites in the U.S., it said, announcing on Wednesday (October 14, 2026) purchase of two launches from the Hyderabad-based Skyroot.
“There’s a real launch capacity shortage right now. We’re excited to work with a new launch provider, Skyroot, to help ensure access to space,” Reflect Orbital co-founder and CEO Ben Nowack said.
Reflect builds and operates orbital mirrors to enable controlled lighting without ground infrastructure, to support a variety of customers and applications, from remote search-and-rescue operations to solar farms generating clean power. For these services to happen, the satellites must first get to space, it said.
“We were recently licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to operate our first spacecraft and we will continue to work with astronomers, local communities and regulators to earn the right to scale,” Mr. Nowack said.
“Reflect Orbital represents the kind of ambitious global space mission the Vikram family is being built to serve… pleased to partner [the firm] across two dedicated launches, providing schedule certainty and mission flexibility,” Skyroot Aerospace co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana said.
No details of the launch date and the financials were, however, mentioned in the joint release by the two startups. The agreement with Reflect Orbital extends Skyroot’s commercial launch manifest across the Vikram family and supports the former’s phased development and deployment plans.
Skyroot’s Vikram-1 became India’s first privately developed orbital rocket to successfully achieve orbit on its maiden flight, in July 2026. It came four years after it launched a rocket into space with Vikram-S. The startup emerged as India’s first spacetech unicorn in May 2026 when it raised nearly $60 million at a $1.1 billion valuation.
Published – October 15, 2026 01:08 pm IST
