Only Three Companies on Earth Had Done This - Now a Bengaluru Startup Is the Fourth

The Engine That Wastes Nothing

• And Why a Startup Built It Before ISRO Did Here's what's actually happening inside EVEREST. In a normal rocket engine, only part of the fuel and oxidiser is used to spin the turbopumps that push propellant into the combustion chamber - the rest goes straight to burning for thrust and the turbopump-driving portion is often vented away, unused for propulsion. A Full-Flow Staged Combustion engine refuses to waste any of it. Both the fuel and the oxidiser are first routed through their own separate pre-burners - small combustion chambers that generate the hot gas needed to spin the turbopumps - before all of that propellant, still unburned in its main quantity, flows into the main chamber to produce thrust. Nothing is diverted and discarded. That's the entire trick and it's also exactly why almost nobody has built one: running fuel-rich and oxidiser-rich pre-burners simultaneously, at extreme temperatures and pressures, without either one corroding or exploding the hardware, is one of the hardest engineering problems in propulsion.

Why This Is the Headline, Not the Engine Itself

Only three organisations on Earth had cracked this before EVEREST: SpaceX (whose Raptor engine is the only FFSC engine currently flying operationally), Stoke Space and China's Land Space. Russia and the USA have separately demonstrated the underlying FFSC principle at a national level.

Astrobase - founded in 2024, two years old, built on India's largest industrial 3D printer and backed by the IN-SPACe Technology Adoption Fund - has now joined that list before ISRO has flown an FFSC engine of its own.

That ordering matters. It's not "India caught up." It's "India's private capital, moving at startup speed and backed by a single government support scheme, closed a gap that usually takes a national space agency decades to close."

Where India Actually Stands The

LOX-Methane choice compounds the significance. Methane burns cleaner than the kerosene most engines use, which means less soot buildup and faster turnaround between reusable flights - precisely the propellant combination the next generation of reusable launch vehicles worldwide is converging on.

Astrobase targeting a 30-tonne LEO payload class puts EVEREST in reusable, medium-lift territory, not just a demonstrator. The real UPSC-relevant point isn't "India built an engine"

• it's that India's post-2020 space sector reforms and the IN-SPACe single-window structure produced, in two years, a private capability that historically only state space programmes have delivered and delivered it in exactly the propulsion architecture the rest of the world is now standardising on.