Dr. C. V. S. Kiran, materials scientist turned founder — fourteen years in German research institutes, then ISRO and Skyroot — is Co-Founder & CEO of Red Balloon Aerospace, Vijayawada, and a Karman Fellow (2025). In this interview with Rashmi Kumari of Neo Science Hub, he relives the rain-soaked morning of Mission SANA, when VISTA proved India’s first super-pressure balloon and validated his patented multilayered nanocomposite — a film that holds hydrogen for six months. He recalls leaving Skyroot “organically,” explains why balloons forgive where rockets are ruthless, names persistence — after the 1956 film — as his company’s creed, and insists that beyond the Kármán line, we are all simply from Earth.
Take us to the morning of 27 May at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in Vijayawada. VISTA rose to nearly 25 kilometres carrying payloads from seven partners — and then came the real test: holding altitude through the day-night temperature swing that has destroyed every ordinary balloon within hours. At what moment did you know it was working, and what was going through your mind?
The 27th was a fantastic day — but it did not begin that way. We reached the stadium before sunrise, and it was raining heavily, with strong winds. Conditions were such that we could not even think of launching the balloon. The entire team was tense; frankly, we were down. Somehow we took some rest during that rain, which turned out to be essential. By the time we came out for the launch, around five o’clock as planned, the rain had subsided, the winds were calm, and the weather was beautiful for a flight. We set up the entire launch infrastructure at the centre of the Indira Gandhi Stadium, working quickly before the chief guest and other dignitaries arrived.
SANA stands for Stratospheric Ascent for Near-space Applications. But there is a second name, very close to our hearts — Srinivasan–Anand Near-space Ascent — in tribute to Mr. Srinivasan and Mr. Anand, who gave their lives to the field of lighter-than-air platforms at the TIFR facility. The mission carries both meanings: the scientific one, and theirs.
We had intended to keep the balloon up for twenty-four hours. But after about seven and a half hours, we saw it was approaching the Indian border — had we not terminated the flight, it would have drifted over international waters. So we brought it down. The payloads were successfully recovered the next day at Raichur and handed over to the customers. Beyond that, a great many of our own flight parameters were validated. The balloon material performed superbly, and we obtained excellent data. Most importantly, we demonstrated the complete chain — manufacturing the balloon, integration, launch, recovery of the payloads, and handing them back to the customers — end to end, for the first time in the country.
And the concept itself matters. These are super-pressure balloons, which can withstand diurnal cycles — the day and night temperature swings. Once a super-pressure balloon reaches its altitude, it retains that altitude regardless of day-night conditions. A zero-pressure balloon, which is what has traditionally been flown in this country, stays at altitude for only a few hours; because of the diurnal gas behaviour it slowly loses height and eventually comes down. The super-pressure balloons we have built are also the structural building blocks for the airships that are our primary interest — the same materials and building blocks will make the entire airship. That is why we went down the super-pressure route.
Tell our readers the story behind Red Balloon Aerospace. Why that name?
Red Balloon happened organically, while we were still at Skyroot. Many customers used to come to Sirish and me for testing and validating their payloads, and we would send them to TIFR — a fantastic organisation. But by early January 2025, delays were mounting; TIFR’s manpower was stretched thin against customer demand, and when we looked across the entire ecosystem, literally no one else was doing this activity. We had found a niche gap, and we said — let’s explore it.
When the idea of a company took shape, the question of a name arose. I proposed many names to Sirish, but we agreed on one principle: nothing with the traditional ‘sky’ or ‘space’ in it. Then Sirish mentioned a film — The Red Balloon, an Oscar winner from the 1950s. We watched it together. It portrays the persistence of a child with his balloon — and persistence is exactly what we do with our airships: positioning a platform at a fixed station and delivering persistent surveillance or communication capability. When Sirish proposed it, I said yes within seconds. The name carries one meaning only — persistence — and we loved it.
You hold a patent on a thin but super-strong material for stratospheric balloons. In simple terms, what problem does this solve that older balloon materials could not?
In everything we do with lighter-than-air platforms, the materials are vital. The envelope must withstand the intense pressure and temperature conditions across the whole journey and at altitude — it must survive minus 80 to minus 90 degrees Celsius without any problem, and it must not tear, which means high strength. So you need a material with high strength, high temperature tolerance, and pressure capability, all at once.
Everyone tries to achieve these properties individually. Our idea was: what if we combine them? Fortunately, my master’s thesis and my PhD were in exactly this field — nanocomposites, polymer–metal nanocomposites and related classes — and that experience helped me design the layered material we have now filed a patent for. Instead of the single-layer film typically used for a zero-pressure balloon, we use a multilayered concept: three distinct layers, one preventing the gas from permeating out, one providing the strength, and one encapsulating and protecting the middle layer. Strength, gas-barrier performance, and protection — combined in one system. We filed the patent, realised the material, and flew it.
When I say ‘balloon’, people imagine a rubber balloon. It is not. It is a scientifically advanced, multilayered nanocomposite polymer. And the balloon is not one single sheet — it is made of lobes, technically called gores, each stitched to the next. There is also an additional element: the load-bearing members. The balloon film itself cannot carry the payload’s weight, so the load-bearing members do — the balloon simply lifts. We manufacture these in-house as well, and a provisional patent has in fact been granted for them. We are the only company in the country doing this after TIFR. These load-bearing members can take payloads from as low as 50 kilograms to as high as 25 tonnes.
You have worked at German research institutes, then ISRO, then Skyroot as head of R&D — three very different worlds. What is one thing each place taught you?
Germany was a fantastic experience — I was there fourteen years, and I learned an enormous amount. The most important thing Germany gave me is ethics. For that I am grateful to everyone I worked with; that ethic flows through my blood.
When I came back to India, at ISRO I fell in love with the materials they work with. I networked widely and learned failure analysis — the way ISRO scientists treat a failure and extract every lesson from it is simply fantastic. ISRO also taught me what it means to take R&D into a real product, a real rocket. I read a great deal about rockets there.
Then Skyroot — which became possible after the Honourable Prime Minister opened the space sector to private activity in 2020. Sirish and I joined at the same time, and it was a completely different world: startup culture, a race you have to run. What I loved most was ownership — the responsibility of taking ownership of things. I took ownership of practically everything there. Working very closely with the founders, Pawan and Bharath — such youngsters — gave me deep insight into how to take an organisation from good to great. We never imagined we would leave Skyroot; it all happened organically. And as people say, one strong organisation keeps generating new ones — many startups are now emerging out of Skyroot. I think that is a good thing for the country.
Did you ever imagine that you and your friend Sirish would start a company together?
Never. As I said, it was entirely organic — out of the blue, we were trying to help someone, and the idea presented itself. But there was one great motivator behind all of this: Dr. Subhananda Rao. He was the person who motivated Skyroot’s formation as well — he cut the ribbon at Skyroot’s first office. He was a great motivator for us too. He is no more; he left us before we even started the company. But his blessings are with us all through.
You helped build India’s first private rocket, Vikram-S. What is one lesson from rockets that turned out to be completely wrong once your challenge became keeping something floating at 20 kilometres for weeks?
A tough question. Rockets are totally different from balloons. When a rocket launches, everything is over in three or four minutes. If there is a mistake in a rocket, it can never be repaired — the rocket goes with its payloads, and if something is wrong, that is the end of it. Any technology that goes to space is ruthless in nature; one should always bear that in mind.
Balloons give us leverage that rockets never can. When we take an airship or a lighter-than-air platform to 25 or 50 kilometres and something is wrong, we can bring it down, repair it, and take it back up again. It is not as ruthless as a rocket. That, in favour of balloons, changes how you think about everything.
When you first proposed the Red Balloon concept to the government, what kind of response did you receive?
Initially, whenever a new technology is proposed, people think it is hype. When fibre and the internet first came, people thought those were hype too. But gradually, physics proves it. After we proved our technology, the response was fantastic. The Honourable Minister of Civil Aviation was a great motivation for us in the way he took the whole thing forward, as was the Member of Parliament Srikrishna Devarayalu, and we received a very warm reception from the Minister of State for Communications, Dr. Pemmasani Chandra Sekhar. I would give these young politicians credit for carrying it forward so well.
We also feel that doing all of this from Vijayawada was a big step — it pushes the ecosystem. We want to build this infrastructure layer from India, and own this layer. Once we proved it, people started believing. The VISTA launch on 27 May — Mission SANA — was the proof of our technology, and that was the point where perceptions changed.
When you told your family you were quitting Skyroot to start your own company, how did they respond?
None of us ever intended to leave Skyroot. My wife said, ‘I thought you would never leave Skyroot’ — and my parents felt the same; nobody imagined I would leave. Even though we left, our hearts are with the organisation. Both Sirish and I remain deeply bonded to Skyroot — just last week I was there, speaking to the next generation of students joining the company, and we will be going for the launch. We hope from the depths of our hearts that Skyroot succeeds, because when Skyroot succeeds, India succeeds. The launch vehicle is the necessity of the hour.
And we may even help the launches one day. A rocket has multiple stages, and the first stage — typically used just to reach 35 to 40 kilometres — consumes more than fifty percent of the rocket’s weight in fuel. If you could carry the rest of the rocket to that altitude with a balloon and launch from there, you would save fifty percent of the fuel — greener, and economically better for the customer. That is one application we envisage for the future.
As for the family — the initial response was not so pleasant, honestly. But once we explained the idea, they became excited too. And we had done our homework. When an idea like this comes to you, it is never only the technical idea — the business model and the technical concept have to mingle perfectly for it to succeed. Both of us worked that through, convinced ourselves, convinced our advisors, and then it moved forward.
Sunlight, extreme temperature swings, and near-zero air pressure at 20–50 kilometres have broken even well-funded projects before yours — like Google’s Loon. What does your material actually do differently — not the pitch-deck version, the real science?
The real science is this: the material must have strength; it must retain the gas, not permeate it; and it must withstand sunlight — the UV and IR radiation at altitude — without degrading. Getting all of these properties into one single layer is extraordinarily difficult; the world has never achieved it. So we do not try. We build multiple layers, each a specialist, joined to the others to form a multilayered composite without losing any individual property — multilayered nanocomposites, with nanoparticles embedded in the matrix, along with layers that encapsulate the gas.
Of the lighter-than-air gases, the two the world knows best are hydrogen and helium — and retaining hydrogen is the toughest of all. With the new material we created, we can encapsulate hydrogen and retain it for over six months. And when a material can hold hydrogen, helium or any other gas is no problem at all — though the reverse does not hold. This is the material we flew on 27 May, and the flight proved that it works, encapsulating the gas for the entire duration.
When you are not working, how do you spend your day?
That is a tough question, because even my hobbies are technical. I love photography — astrophotography especially — and I love to build and devise equipment, to create things, to automate things. I keep a benchmark in my head: nothing is tougher than the engines used in rockets. So whenever anyone says something is difficult, I say no — nothing is tougher than that, and everything has a solution. That is the way we try to work. My hobbies all point in that direction — mostly technical.
When you say your platform is ‘reusable’, what does that actually mean? Are we talking about it flying dozens of times, hundreds of times, or staying up for years?
The airships we are designing can stay aloft for over six months — as long as the material does not permeate the hydrogen out. And they are reusable in two senses. First: after six months, or once the gas has come down to a certain level, we bring the platform safely back to the ground, refill the hydrogen, and send it up again — we are even envisaging refilling in near-space itself, from specialised tanks stationed there, to extend the lifetime further. That is persistence over a fixed location, serving continuous activities on the ground. Second: we can also fly point-to-point and land payloads — the cargo delivery people ask for.
Compare that with satellites. A satellite, at the end of its life cycle, gradually enters the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up. The payloads are never recovered; you cannot refurbish them, repurpose them, or upgrade them with new technology. What we are doing is the opposite — using the platform over and over again.
India has tough geography — mountains, islands, remote regions. Did that shape how you built this, or would this platform work anywhere in the world?
These platforms are made for anywhere in the world. But India’s difficult terrains show exactly what they are for. Take the Northeast, or regions where disasters strike frequently. For such situations we have the tethered aerostats — our ALTIS platforms. Our airships are the HELIX platforms, and the balloons are the VISTA platforms. In a disaster-affected region, we can hoist an entire ALTIS aerostat within two hours, restoring communications and providing full surveillance over the area so that rescue operations can be performed far more effectively.
Since childhood, did you plan this profession — or did you land somewhere you never expected?
From childhood I always wanted to be a scientist. In my ninth and tenth class I was fascinated by atomic science — nuclear science — and I wanted to work in atomic research laboratories. Gradually, though, materials claimed me, and from my bachelor’s onwards I never changed course. That does not mean I stopped learning new things. I went deep into electronics; I was fascinated by computers and learned practically everything available at the time as a hobby — assembling computers during my intermediate years, digitalising our lab reports during my B.Tech, doing web administration, building websites for the university, building hardware firewalls and file servers. When someone says something is not possible, I say — no, it is possible, because I did it ten or fifteen years ago.
That is how my parents brought me up. My mother used to go on field work, and I accompanied her whenever possible, collecting rock and mineral samples. That is what took me into metallurgy and materials — I studied at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology, Gandipet, in metallurgy and materials, and continued in materials through my master’s and my PhD, specifically polymer–metal nanocomposites.
Then came a moment when I wanted to solve a problem and challenged my professor — and he said, prove it to me. So I had to learn a new instrument: the transmission electron microscope. The moment I learned it, new ideas came — expensive ideas! Professor Franz Faupel brought me into nanocomposites, and Professor Lorenz Kienle brought me into electron microscopy, both at the University of Kiel. There I decided that one of today’s most important problems is energy — and it all triggered from a mobile phone. Even today, a phone does not work beyond two years the way it did when you bought it, and the basic problem is the battery. I said, let us find out why batteries fail — with a multidisciplinary, multi-level characterisation approach. I learned in-situ electron microscopy and created a new course in it in Germany, then moved from Kiel to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where I headed the in-situ electron microscopy group with Christian Kübel, a very close friend, and Professor Horst Hahn.
Germany gave me ethics, and a huge body of publications — by the time I reached India my h-index was around forty. At ISRO my perception of research changed: I wanted to use whatever I researched in practical scenarios, and Skyroot gave me that opportunity. And now I am genuinely proud to say that the work I did at Kiel on polymer–metal nanocomposites has been utilised effectively in a real product at Red Balloon Aerospace. The entire brain of our material stems from my master’s and PhD work — which is why we could realise it so fast, where other companies have taken five or ten years to build their first lighter-than-air platform.
Many of our viewers want to know — how did you, Pawan, and Sirish meet?
Lots of sweet memories there. Sirish joined Skyroot a few days before me, I think, after meeting Pawan. I met Pawan while I was still at ISRO — I took the opportunity to meet him, and I told him honestly, ‘I want to work with you, but I am not sure whether I will be the right fit.’ When I joined Skyroot, I got to work very closely with Sirish. We were part of the founding team, when the company had perhaps thirty or forty employees, and we interacted constantly in those initial days.
It was a fantastic experience because the organisation was not somebody else’s — it was ours. That feeling — ‘this organisation where I work is mine’ — is what improves an organisation. We carry it into Red Balloon today: whenever we look at new people, what we look for is passion, and the obsession to create something. We are building infrastructure, and the people who join should be obsessed with that style of working. Such people are difficult to find — but once you find them, the organisation runs like a horse.
Companies like World View and other global players are working on similar technology. Does being based in India help you, or put you at a disadvantage?
It is actually the other way around — it is an advantage. There are many benefits to running this organisation from within India. And this race we are running is one every country is now running; it is not that someone is definitively ahead of us. As of now, World View has demonstrated something like forty-nine days of endurance. Many players are in the same race, and ultimately it is all a game of materials — how you improve these materials over and over again to get the best out of them. That is the race we are running.
And India has a definite strategic advantage. The whole world is looking at India right now — over four hundred startups in the space ecosystem — and all of them working together, interdependently, is what leads to a product the world must take notice of. I am quite sure we are going to change things.
You often say ‘One Earth, One Space’. Tell our viewers what you mean by it.
It is something I resonate with deeply, also as part of the Karman Fellowship I was awarded in 2025. Think of it this way. When I travel from my home town to Delhi, I introduce myself by my city — I am from Vijayawada, from Hyderabad, from Bangalore. When I go from Delhi to an event in the United States, I say — I am from India; nobody says I am from Bangalore or Chennai. But when we go to space, what do we still say? ‘I am from the US.’ That mentality should go from mankind. One should say: I am from Earth. Oneness is what matters up there.
Consider where we are heading — space tourism, for instance. When an international team travels in a capsule to near-space by balloon, people of many nationalities will be aboard together. We should introduce ourselves, when we cross into space, as being from Earth, not from a particular country. That is what unites us. Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla resonates with the same feeling, from our previous discussions, and there are many people across the world who feel it too. This oneness is what unites the world — with fewer problems.
What message would you like to give our young readers?
I always say the same things. First — do your homework. Do not say ‘my homework was done by my AI assistant.’ My homework is mine, and I have to do it. Second — whatever you do, do it with passion. Give your hundred percent, not ninety. That hundred percent passion turns into obsession, and then everything becomes ours: if something falls on the ground, clean it — it is our mess, and we created it. That is what takes you to the next level. With that, I will say simply one word: Jai Hind.
Finally — what advice would you give to someone who wants to start their own space company?
Both Sirish and I advise many companies in the space ecosystem, and here is what we see: people come with beautiful ideas — always technical ideas. Technical people tend to think the business model is not necessary. But both are absolutely vital; they are the two wheels, and without both, nothing moves. The financial model incorporates everything, and it must evolve in parallel with the technical work, continuously improvised against changing scenarios — including changing geopolitical scenarios. That is what takes a good company to a great company. That is exactly what we practise at Red Balloon. Sirish comes with a very strong background in business development — with an aerospace technical background behind it as well — and I come from the technical side. All of it, combined, is what builds a successful organisation. And that is what we are building at Red Balloon Aerospace.
