Professional Insight

      When India launched its first private rocket in 2022, I was in the room where materials decisions were made. At Skyroot Aerospace, as VP of Materials and Strategic Initiatives, I helped turn audacious engineering into orbital reality. Before that, at ISRO, I worked on the materials that keep rockets intact under forces most people will never experience.
      But rockets reach orbit and move on. What I kept asking was: who owns the layer in between?
     The stratosphere, 20 to 50 kilometres above Earth, is the most underutilised and strategically critical domain in modern aerospace. It sits below satellites, above conventional aviation, and largely above geopolitics. Persistent. Sovereign. Accessible. It is where the next decade of connectivity, surveillance, and logistics infrastructure will be built.
      That is why I co-founded Red Balloon Aerospace, to build India's first integrated stratospheric infrastructure company.
      We are developing four converging platforms: VISTA (super-pressure stratospheric balloons), ALTIS (long-endurance tethered aerostats), HELIX (hydrogen-lift cargo airships), and DIVE (an AI-driven data inference engine), a unified architecture for near-space intelligence, persistent ISR, 6G backhaul, and aerial logistics across a $103B global NTN market.
     My foundation spans 20+ years across ISRO, Skyroot, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Helmholtz Institute Ulm, in materials science, nanotechnology, additive manufacturing, and energy systems. I hold a Dr. -Ing. from University of Kiel and am a Karman Fellow 2025, Fellow of APAS and TAS, and Adjunct Faculty at NIAS.
       India does not need to look up at near-space and watch others claim it. We are here to claim it ourselves.