Dr. Chiranjeevi Phanindra B spent 15 years at ISRO as an aerothermal specialist, playing a key role in human spaceflight as Deputy Project Director for Gaganyaan. Representing ISRO at the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), he recognized orbital debris as a critical global crisis. Driven to bridge technological gaps in satellite remediation, he founded Cosmoserve Space to pioneer scalable orbital cleanup solutions.
In this exclusive interview with Rashmi Kumari of Neo Science Hub, Dr. Phanindra discusses transitioning from flagship national space programs to deep-tech entrepreneurship. He details Cosmoserve’s biomimetic soft-robotic capture mechanism, breaks down lessons learned from their low-cost orbital test flight Mission Embrace, and outlines how shifting international regulations are establishing a viable commercial market for active debris removal.
You spent 15 years at ISRO working on flagship programs like Gaganyaan. What specific insight or turning point during that career convinced you to leave public spaceflight and launch Cosmoserve Space?
I spent 15 years at the Indian Space Research Organisation. I joined the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in 2010 and worked on the aerothermal aspects of rockets and re-entry vehicles for almost eight years. When human spaceflight started as a new vertical within ISRO, I moved to the Human Space Flight Centre in Bengaluru, where I spent about six and a half years, including as Deputy Project Director on Gaganyaan.
During that period I became a member of the IADC, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, a body of 13 space agencies that meets every year to discuss the problem. Through that journey I understood that space debris was going to become a very large problem very soon. And as an insider, I could see the gaps in the existing technologies. That is when I decided to leave ISRO and start Cosmoserve Space.
Most Active Debris Removal concepts rely on rigid robotic arms, harpoons, or nets. What made you bet on soft robotics, and how do your petals capture a tumbling, non-cooperative target?
Existing solutions either require a magnetic docking plate pre-installed on the target, or rigid robotic arms with limited degrees of freedom. We wanted to solve a harder and more general problem: capturing an object of any shape and size in space. That is how we arrived at soft robotic petals.
The capture system is inspired by a carnivorous plant, the Venus flytrap. When an insect enters, the plant closes its lobes around it. Our soft robotic petals work in a similar way, conforming around the target, and can capture objects ranging from 10 centimetres to 2 metres in size.
Take us inside the mission control room during the launch of Mission Embrace aboard Vikram-1. At what point did the team realize the robotic petals hadn’t deployed as planned?
It was a goosebumps moment. Sitting in the mission control room, watching Vikram-1 lift off and each stage pass by, and then finally seeing the Embrace hardware in orbit, was a goosebumps moment for the entire team.
As per our pre-launch plan, the petals were supposed to open during a roughly 100-second window covered by the video feed. On the feed, the petals did not open. I was very curious to know exactly what had happened, so I went to the launch control centre and collected the data immediately. We could see that the majority of our systems had functioned, but some small issue had prevented the petals from opening. We came straight back to work, built our hypotheses, and built test setups to understand why. Today we have a good understanding of what happened, and we are preparing for our second mission.
Mission Embrace was categorized as a partial success. How would you explain the actual failure mechanisms to a skeptical engineer, and what changes have you made for the next flight?
There could be different reasons, and I would be straightforward with a sceptical engineer: we did not have sensors everywhere, so we cannot point to one single confirmed cause from flight data alone. Our ground testing points to two likely causes. First, the wire that holds the petals in place during launch may not have been cut. Second, the extreme temperatures in orbit may have caused the petals to soften.
We have mitigated both. For the next mission we have added redundancy and higher-reliability release systems, and we have included heaters for the petals.
You have argued that flying low-cost hardware early is smarter than waiting for a complete satellite build. How do the economics of Mission Embrace justify that philosophy in space engineering?
Mission Embrace cost us $100,000. If we had built a full satellite with a propulsion system and flown the soft robotic petals on it, that would have cost anywhere between $2.5 million and $3 million.
And the same issue we observed on Embrace would have appeared on that bigger mission, and the entire mission would have failed. That is exactly why I believe this approach is right in a field where mistakes are permanent: you find your failure modes on small, inexpensive flights, so the large, expensive missions do not carry them. Flying this mission within just one year of starting the company, for $100,000, and coming away with such valuable lessons is a great achievement in our view.
Debris removal has historically relied on government research grants. Who pays for Active Debris Removal today, and what enforces the market demand?
The satellite operators. Until recently, there was no regulatory obligation to remove a satellite at the end of its life, so there was no commercial market. That has changed: new regulations now require operators to remove their dead satellites once their mission is over. That has created a commercial market almost overnight. The operators who have to comply with these rules are our customers, and they will pay because removal is now a condition of operating in orbit.
Under international space law, states retain permanent ownership and liability for their orbital objects. How do you navigate authorization and liability when capturing third-party satellites?
Before we approach or capture a satellite in space, there has to be an active contract between the companies involved. Equally important, as you point out, the launching state remains responsible for any object it puts in space. So there must be an agreement between the two countries, the service provider’s country and the customer’s country, that enables the companies to conduct proximity operations and allows the service provider to capture the satellite. These frameworks are very important, and they are evolving over time.
Skyroot Aerospace launched your first payload, and its co-founder Pawan Chandana is a Founding Partner at Cosmoserve. How do you maintain operational independence in that relationship?
Pawan and I worked together for six years at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, and we have been friends for almost 14 years. When I wanted to leave ISRO and start Cosmoserve, he was the first person I reached out to. He handheld me through starting the company, and he became a Founding Partner of Cosmoserve Space in a non-executive role.
But the mission on Skyroot has nothing to do with our personal relationship. It is a customer and service-provider relationship. I work with everyone on their team, the business development side and the technical side, because this is a mission we are doing together. It is not between Chiran and Pawan; it is between Cosmoserve and Skyroot.
Cosmoserve plans to deploy Mothercraft–Reviver architecture to clear hundreds of dead objects. What does your flight roadmap look like over the next twelve months?
Each Mothercraft and Reviver pair will be able to remove up to 100 dead satellites from space. To serve multiple customers, we will deploy multiple Mothercraft–Reviver pairs. That is the plan.
Now that Embrace-1 is complete, over the next year we are flying four missions: two on aerial platforms and two in space. The aerial missions are a drone flight and a parabolic flight. The space missions are Embrace-2 and a larger mission on which we are integrating a propulsion system into a satellite platform we have built, together with our vision-based navigation system and robotic petals. That mission will demonstrate our entire architecture end to end: going to space, capturing a dead satellite, and removing it from orbit.
As a founder transitioning from senior engineering at ISRO to running a startup, what has been harder—fundraising, hiring, or public transparency after a test flight?
All of them are challenging: fundraising, hiring, and telling the world about our first mission. But I love challenges, and I enjoy them as much as any other part of my work. If you enjoy the challenges, you keep moving forward.
And we don’t see what happened on Embrace-1 as a setback. Embrace-1 gave us great lessons at a very minimal cost and in a very short time. We see it as a boon for the company that we could learn these lessons from space on this mission.
When you look ahead to 2050 with clean, sustainable Earth orbits, what benchmark do you want Cosmoserve to be remembered for?
I want people to remember Cosmoserve as the company that revolutionised space sustainability.
