Ahmedabad: In a sign of Indian deep-tech talent returning home to build frontier hardware, Cosmochute, a startup incubated at IIMA Ventures, is setting up a moon surface simulator that will be ready by Jan to test critical subsystems for its modular lunar rover.Founders of the startup — Amit Chowdhary, Janhavi Gore, and Dhruv Sangal — relocated from the UK to Ahmedabad after working together for nearly four years at Orbex, a Scotland-based space launch company. The team is positioning itself early in the emerging Lunar Economy – a term denoting interest in moon for commercial and industrial purposes – as global activity around moon gathers pace.The startup recently raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round. As World Space Week was celebrated in Oct, the month became a milestone for other spacetech startups in Ahmedabad, too. While Orbitt Space successfully test-fired its indigenous propulsion system, Om Space created the nose cone and landing system for its ambitious rocket project.Chowdhry, co-founder and COO of Cosmochute, said that their dream is to be part of the emerging economy in the next decade. “There has been a renewed interest in the moon, and right from the US, Europe, Japan, UAE, Turkey, to India, several countries have planned missions around it. Our idea is simple – we are building reusable, interoperable rovers for the Moon that will cut cost of surface mobility for the countries,” he said.The company currently operates from IIMA Ventures, where the founders are building the ground infrastructure needed to develop and validate a lunar mobility platform. All three founders have backgrounds in fields such as aeronautical engineering, space systems engineering, and avionics and embedded software engineering.The Moon surface simulator is intended to replicate key lunar conditions, including terrain and lighting, to speed up iteration before any field deployments or mission partnerships.“Here we intend to recreate the lunar surface with help of similar regolith (crystalline rock fragments) design and simulate very less gravity through steps such as reducing the rover’s weight in a specific proportion, using a rig design that can simulate very weak gravity of the lunar surface,” said Gore, co-founder and CEO of Cosmochute.She added that another major aspect of the simulator is an artificial sun. “One of the major issues faced by the rover cameras is direct sunlight on its camera, making surface navigation and proximity operations of the mechanisms challenging. We will iterate our control algorithms to optimise the camera function for when the sun is directly in front of them,” she said.The team is mentored by Mylswamy Annadurai, former programme director of Isro’s Chandrayaan-1 mission.Christopher Parmar, the co-founder and CEO of Orbitt Space, recently explained the concept of an indigenously developed propulsion system for satellites in Very Low-Earth Orbit (VLEO) to PM Narendra Modi at ESTIC 2026. The city-based startup by former ISRO scientists is working on satellites operating around 200 km above Earth using air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) that uses the thin atmosphere itself as propellant.“We achieved the milestone of 18 mN (millinewton) of thrust using air as the only propellant in Oct. It was just after 18 months of founding. Every component is designed and built in-house in India,” said Parmar, adding that it paves the way for an orbital demonstration in the near future.For Om Space, the startup aiming to create a reusable rocket, the month marked the completion of creating a nose cone – positioned at the forward section of the vehicle – and a kick stage – providing the final propulsion and structural support required to help place the payload into its intended orbit.Ravindra Raj, founder and CEO of Om Space, said that the completion will enable the startup to move into the next phase of integration, structural and functional testing, subsystem validation, and progressive vehicle-level testing for their rocket Infinity One. The startup had test-fired its sounding rocket from Dholera in March this year.
