Getting to orbit is only half the battle. The other half is getting the rocket back in one piece, ready to fly again. Abyom SpaceTech & Defence wants India’s rockets to fire, land and repeat — and it is building every piece of that dream in-house in Hyderabad.
The company was founded in 2020 by Jainul Abedin, who set out to build reusable rockets at 19. Its name comes from the Sanskrit ‘Vyom’, meaning sky, and its mission is simple to state and hard to execute: make space access reusable, reliable and affordable for civil and defence missions alike. Abyom is incubated at the BITS Pilani Hyderabad Technology Business Incubator, and from that campus it runs its own rocket-engine test facilities.
Abyom’s bet is vertical integration down to the test stand itself. Its containerised Rocket Engine Test Facility is a mobile, plug-and-play hot-fire rig that lets the team iterate on engines quickly, and it is also open to universities and other startups — BITS Pilani, IIT Madras and IIT Bombay have all fired hardware there, the company says. The rig is now the subject of a fresh Indian patent, No. 600565, for a ‘Device and Method for Rocket Engines Test Facility’. For Abyom, testing hardware is part of the product, not just overhead.
The engines that fire on that stand are the BSE-I and BSE-II, liquid-propulsion units the company has put through more than 250 hot-fire tests across its facilities, including an in-house 2.5-kN engine. In June 2026 it completed a qualification test campaign for its reusable liquid rocket engine at its own Commercial Test Facility in Shamirpet, with the engine, control architecture, instrumentation and data acquisition all designed and built internally. The company describes it as India’s first fully indigenous reusable liquid rocket engine — every bolt and byte built by its own team.
Those engines feed the company’s two rocket programmes: FRE, the Flight Ready Engine line, and HOPE, a vertical take-off and vertical landing reusable rocket programme. Abyom is working towards a VTVL demonstrator in 2026 and has set its sights on India’s first reusable rocket launch by 2028.
The work is drawing institutional recognition. Abyom holds DSIR recognition for its in-house R&D, support from MeitY’s TIDE 2.0 programme, and a research MoU with BITS Pilani, and it was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025. Its young propulsion team is backed by heavyweight mentors, including a cryogenics lead with four decades at ISRO and an additional director with two decades at DRDO, the company says.
More Read
If Abyom’s roadmap holds, the most expensive part of a satellite launch — the rocket itself — could stop being single-use hardware for India. From a campus incubator in Hyderabad, the company is turning fire, the oldest test in rocketry, into the foundation of a reusable launch future.
