This Hyderabad Startup Will Clean Up Space Junk — India’s First Private Space-Debris Facility Opens

There are thousands of dead satellites and millions of fragments of debris circling the Earth, and every new launch adds to the traffic. Until now, India had no private company equipped to do anything about it — no facility to practise catching a dead satellite, refuelling a live one, or removing junk from orbit. On 5 November, that changed. Cosmoserve Space unveiled “Base 1” in Hyderabad, India’s first private space-debris removal and satellite-servicing facility, built by a man who spent close to 15 years at ISRO. The ambition is large: bring the cost of servicing a satellite down from about $10 million to under $1 million, and put India in a market projected to be worth $14.5 billion by 2030.

Base 1 opens in Hyderabad

Cosmoserve Space unveiled “Base 1” in Hyderabad on 5 November — India’s first private facility for space debris removal and satellite servicing. The company describes it as the world’s sixth facility equipped with space-vision effects and microgravity simulation; that “world’s sixth” claim comes from Cosmoserve itself, repeated by the outlets covering the launch, and has not been independently verified, so this article attributes it to the company rather than stating it as independent fact.

The facility was inaugurated by Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Dr Jitendra Singh, virtually from Kartavya Bhawan in New Delhi, and by Telangana IT Minister D Sridhar Babu. Minister Singh used the occasion to announce a vision of a “debris-free space by 2030” — an ambition, not a programme with published milestones, but a sign of how the government wants the facility to be understood: as part of a national push, not a single company’s project.

What the facility actually does

Base 1 covers about 14,800 sq ft at VSD Tech Park in Gachibowli, and it has four units: an Orbital Rendezvous and Capture Lab, a Space Robotics Innovation Lab, an ISO Class 8 clean room, and a Mission Simulation and Control Centre. Together they cover the full loop of in-orbit servicing: practising the approach and capture of another object in space, building and testing the robotics that do the grabbing, assembling hardware in a clean environment, and simulating and controlling missions from the ground.

The work it will support is satellite repairs, refuelling, and the removal of inactive satellites. The company’s dual-spacecraft design aims to service up to 100 satellites, and to cut the cost of servicing from about $10 million to under $1 million per satellite. That cost claim is the commercial heart of the story: at $10 million a service, only the most valuable satellites are worth saving; under $1 million, servicing becomes a routine option, and removing debris becomes affordable rather than aspirational.

The founder: 15 years at ISRO

Founder and chief executive Dr Chiranjeevi Phanindra is a former ISRO scientist of close to 15 years, who served as Deputy Project Director of Gaganyaan — India’s human spaceflight programme. He set up Cosmoserve in June 2025, barely 17 months before Base 1 opened.

That background is the reason the facility exists in this form. Building a rendezvous-and-capture lab is not a generic startup project; it needs people who have thought about how two objects meet in orbit, how a robotic arm behaves in microgravity, and how a mission is controlled from the ground. Phanindra’s ISRO career, and Gaganyaan in particular, is where that experience comes from — and it is the credential the company will be judged on when its first demonstration flies.

Money, milestones and the market

Cosmoserve raised $6 million in a seed round led by Japan’s Rebright Partners, taking its total funding to over $9 million. The facility itself cost about Rs 6 crore to build, and about 60% of mission components are sourced locally — a detail that matters for a company whose pitch includes building an Indian supply chain for space servicing, not just a facility.

The milestones so far are real but early. The first payload, “Mission Embrace”, flew in July 2026 aboard Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket. The next technology demonstration is planned by mid-2027, the first commercial mission in early 2028, and commercial operations by mid-2028. The market for in-orbit servicing is projected at $14.5 billion by 2030 — a projection, not a fact, but the number that explains why investors, including a Japanese fund, are backing a Hyderabad startup to clean up orbit.

The honest summary is this: India now has a private facility designed to do something no Indian company could do before — catch, refuel and remove satellites in orbit. Whether it becomes a business depends on the mid-2027 demonstration and the early-2028 commercial mission. Until then, Base 1 is a bet, made by a former ISRO scientist, that the cheapest satellite in orbit is the one you repair rather than replace.