How Manu Nair and EtherealX Are Building India's Answer to the Rocket Monopoly
India's most-watched space startup has secured $130M in launch contracts without launching a single rocket. Here is why the world is paying attention.
Over 85% of all commercial payloads going into orbit today ride on one vehicle, built by one company, in one country. Not because that company is the only option - because it has, functionally, become the only option.
Manu J. Nair, co-founder and CEO of the Ethereal Exploration Guild (EtherealX), has a precise word for that situation. He does not call it a monopoly.
What we have today is not market dominance. It is market dependence. That is not how we envision the future of space.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is not blocking anyone. It is simply too busy. With the Starlink constellation consuming much of its own launch cadence, every other satellite operator is essentially a guest on someone else’s vehicle, booking whatever slots remain, often designing their product around a bottleneck rather than solving it.
EtherealX, incorporated in May 2022, was built to remove that bottleneck. Their vehicle, the Razor Crest Mk-1, is a 71-meter fully reusable medium-lift rocket, roughly the height of a 20-story building, capable of carrying up to 24.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit in expendable configuration and 8 tonnes when both stages are recovered. No other company in the medium-lift category is attempting full, two-stage reusability.
The market appears to agree that this matters. Manu and the team closed a $20.5 million Series A in December 2025, co-led by TDK Ventures and BIG Capital with participation from Accel and Prosus, oversubscribed from an initial $15 million target. Post-money valuation: $80.5 million, a 5.5x jump. Total capital raised across four rounds stands at $26.3 million. More telling is the $130 million in signed launch contracts secured from six international customers, including Japan’s SpaceBD, Taiwan’s Space Agency, and SABR, a European government launch aggregator, all before the rocket has flown once.
Those customers are not buying a rocket. They are buying insurance against a world where one country controls access to orbit.
The Physics Trick at the Heart of the Business
The reason EtherealX’s economics can work where others have struggled comes down to one engineering decision: what to do with the upper stage.
On a standard Falcon 9 flight, the upper stage costs roughly $12.5 to $15 million to manufacture and is expended after delivering its payload, burning up in the atmosphere. That figure represents 30 to 35% of total vehicle cost per flight. Falcon 9’s partial reusability, where only the booster returns, set a new industry standard. But it did not solve the upper stage problem.
Every company building a reusable upper stage treats re-entry heat as the enemy, relying on heavy ablative shielding or fragile ceramic tiles to survive it. Manu’s team asked a different question entirely.
Why fight the re-entry heat when we can utilize it? The damage is also advantageous, until a point where it is not. Then you replace. It basically follows a bell curve, just like an afterburner on a jet.
The result is the Full Flow Segregated Cooling Cycle (FFSCC), a proprietary engine feed cycle that routes re-entry plasma heat through the system to drive the engine turbines, executing a propulsive braking burn on the way down. Every kilogram of heavy shielding eliminated becomes a kilogram of revenue-generating payload. Manu claims this is the first new rocket engine feed cycle developed in six decades of rocketry, a claim that is pending IP protection.
The only globally comparable effort is Stoke Space in the US, which recently crossed $1 billion in total funding and is working toward upper-stage recovery in the small-lift category. Manu is the only founder pursuing this in the medium-lift segment.
From a Dinner Table to 150 Acres in Andhra Pradesh
Manu’s path here was not a straight line. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he was one of 12 candidates selected globally for Project PoSSUM, a NASA-aided scientist-astronaut program. He went on to work at ISRO’s Human Spaceflight Centre, where he met co-founder Shubhayu Sardar, a 10-year ISRO veteran. At Manastu Space in Mumbai, he met co-founder Prashant Sharma, who led propulsion. The company started, as Manu tells it, over a dinner conversation and money borrowed from his father.
Three years on, the infrastructure is real. BASE-001 in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, is India’s highest pressure-rated privately built rocket engine test facility, constructed from scratch because no adequate public infrastructure existed. BASE-002, on a 150-acre parcel in Space City, Andhra Pradesh, acquired with state government support, will handle integrated manufacturing, assembly, and stage-level testing for the full vehicle, located within an hour of the launch pad.
The Technology Demonstrator Vehicle orbital launch is targeted for 2026 to 2027. Manu has been deliberate about skipping suborbital test flights: the FFSCC re-entry profile only produces meaningful data at actual orbital velocities, around 7.8 kilometers per second. Anything less does not replicate the thermal conditions the system is designed for.
The recognitions have followed the milestones. In 2025, Manu and Prashant were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the Industry, Manufacturing and Energy category. EtherealX received the Aegis Graham Bell Award from India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, was listed among Forbes India’s Select 200, and became the first startup outside the US and Europe invited to Beyond Gravity’s Launchpad Program.
On pricing, Manu’s target starts at $350 per kilogram, against an industry average of $5,000 to $6,000 today. A fleet of two to three vehicles, each targeting a 72 to 96-hour turnaround between flights, is how he plans to get there. His advice to the deep tech founders watching all of this is characteristically direct.
Not every great idea is a money-making idea. And not every money-making idea is a great idea. Building a launcher company is different from building a venture-backed, commercially scalable launcher company. People do not realize those are two different things.
The rocket does not exist yet. The land does. The contracts do. The test campaigns begin this year.
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