An Indian company just made spaceflight history.

Skyroot Aerospace successfully launched its Vikram-1 rocket to low Earth orbit (LEO) early Saturday morning (July 18), making India just the third country with a private orbital launch capability. The other two are established space powers — the U.S. and China.

"It is the dawn of a new space era," one of Skyroot's commentators said during the company's launch webcast on Saturday.

Skyroot Aerospace is based in the central Indian city of Hyderabad and was founded in 2018. The company made history for the first time four years later with its Vikram-S suborbital rocket, becoming the first private Indian outfit ever to reach space.

Vikram-1 is the next step for Skyroot: an orbital vehicle. The four-stage, seven-story-tall rocket is a small-satellite launcher; it can haul about 770 pounds (350 kilograms) of payload to LEO, according to the company.

"The small satellite launch market is deeply constrained on the supply side," Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 16).

"At the same time, the demand for services enabled by satellites in space will only continue to grow, and that is where Skyroot's opportunity lies," added Chandana, who, like company co-founder Naga Bharath Daka, used to work for the Indian Space Research Organisation.

The company began exploiting that opportunity on Saturday morning, with a test flight called Aagaman (Sanskrit for "Arrival"). The main goal was to see how Vikram-1 and its various systems performed during flight. But the rocket also carried some customer payloads, which were scheduled to be deployed at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers).

Those payloads included a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; the Solaras S3 nanosatellite pathfinder from Indian startup Grahaa Space; and Embrace, a robotic arm built by the Indian company Cosmoserve Space that's designed to capture space debris.

Vikram-1 also carried Skyroot's SCOPE satellite, which collected a variety of data to help the company assess the rocket's performance during flight. There were two symbolic payloads on board as well — a small, 18-karat gold rocket from the artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada and "Cosmic Bloom," which was designed by Cosmos Diamonds, a company that makes jewelry using lab-grown gems.

All of them made it to space safe and sound. Vikram-1 lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the Indian barrier island of Sriharikota, on Saturday at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT; 12:05 p.m. India Standard Time), roaring off the pad in a flash thanks to its first-stage solid rocket motor.

The rocket performed as planned, sticking to a nominal trajectory and deploying the payloads right on schedule. Vikram-1 had ticked all of its boxes by just 17 minutes after liftoff, leading to a pronouncement from mission control.

"The Vikram-1 Aagaman mission is a grand success," the mission director said, eliciting cheers from the folks in the room.

It was a big moment for Skyroot and for India, and it augurs big things to come, according to Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (retired), Director General of the Indian Space Association.

"The successful orbital launch of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 (Mission Aagaman) is a defining milestone for India’s space journey," Bhatt said in an emailed statement shortly after the mission wrapped up. "By executing the nation's first fully private orbital flight, Skyroot has shattered legacy boundaries, demonstrating that our domestic industry is primed to handle end-to-end space missions."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:25 a.m. ET on July 18 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

Update for 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17: SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Starship wasn't quite ready to fly today (July 16).

SpaceX tried to launch the Starship megarocket on its 13th test flight today but couldn't quite pull it off. Something went wrong just as the giant vehicle's 33 first-stage Raptor engines started to fire up, and an abort was triggered.

"We'll take some time, dig into what triggered that abort once the booster was igniting to launch, and then we'll figure out what our path forward is going to be," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's launch webcast today.

It didn't take long for SpaceX to narrow in on the root cause and address it.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said this evening via X, the social media platform he owns.

Starship Flight 13 will fly from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. Today's attempt occurred at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local time), right at the beginning of a 90-minute launch window.

Flight 13 will be the second test launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), an upgraded variant of the megarocket designed to get it up to operational status.

V3's first jaunt, Flight 12 on May 22, was mostly successful, but there were a few issues. For example, Starship's Super Heavy first stage didn't steer itself back for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned, and the Ship upper stage wasn't able to relight one of its Raptor engines in space.

Starship V3 will get a second chance on Flight 13, whose goals are similar to those of Flight 12: Get Super Heavy down on target in the Gulf and send Ship most of the way around the world, for a controlled splashdown of its own off the coast of Western Australia. (Ship pulled that off on Flight 12.)

There are a few new objectives, however.

The most notable is the payload suite flying on Flight 13 — 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites. The company wants to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit using Starship, and Flight 13 will mark the satellites' first-ever trip to space.

They won't stay up there, however; the spacecraft will be deployed on Ship's suborbital trajectory and will crash back to Earth after about 20 minutes, according to SpaceX.

Six of the 20 Starlinks going up on Flight 13 will be equipped with cameras, to image Ship's heat shield. SpaceX did this with a couple of V2 Starlinks on Flight 12 as well.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:38 p.m. ET on July 16 with information from an Elon Musk X post.