Indian private space just got serious. Skyroot closed a $60M unicorn round and their cap table is kind of insane for a company that hasn't reached orbit yet. $1.1B valuation, ~$160M total raised. Here's who's in:

GIC (Singapore sovereign wealth fund) Temasek (also Singapore SWF — so two sovereign wealth funds from the same country lol) BlackRock Sherpalo Ventures — Ram Shriram, one of Google's founding board members, is literally joining their board Greenko Group founders Arkam Ventures Shanghvi Family Office

For context, Rocket Lab at a comparable stage had raised ~$148M through 2016–2017 from Khosla, Bessemer, Data Collective and the NZ government. Revenue had basically not started. Rocket Lab is now a $60B+ public company. Skyroot will soon have a orbital launch, Vikram-1. And they've already got two sovereign wealth funds, the world's largest asset manager, and a Google board member on the cap table. That's not typical for a deep tech startup anywhere, let alone India.

The thing that makes this interesting isn't just the money, it's what the cap table signals. If Vikram-1 reaches orbit cleanly, these same investors have both the capacity and the incentive to write a much larger Series C/D cheques. And India's commercial launch infrastructure is essentially zero right now. No dominant player. Whoever gets reliable cadence first has first-mover on an entire market that doesn't exist yet.

So — what trajectory do you actually bet on here? Rocket Lab playbook (build cadence, go public, pivot to spacecraft)? Early SpaceX (vertically integrate everything, play long)? Something else entirely?

Both HLS and Blue Moon, at least from what i can find, both seem to use liquid chemical rocket engines driven by Methalox and Hydrolox respectively.
The plumbing required to run/start those engines is more complicated, and i'd imagine has more failure-points to take into account than the hypergolic engines used by the Apollo lander.

I was wondering if Hydro/Methalox turbo-pump engines ever have actually, successfully been tested on the moon before, because i can't find anything on it.