Bengaluru-based private space technology company Ethereal Exploration Guild (The Guild) has opened The Anchorage, a 150-acre rocket development and testing facility located in Space City, approximately 40 km from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-SHAR) at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh’s Tirupati district.
The facility will support the development, testing, and qualification of the company’s Razor Crest Mk 1 (RCM1), a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle engineered to recover and reuse both its booster and upper stage.
The RCM1 features two semi-cryogenic rocket engines: Pegasus, an 80 kN upper-stage engine, and Stallion, a 1.2 MN gas-generator booster engine designed for lift-off and atmospheric ascent. Pegasus uses The Guild’s in-house Full-Flow Segregated Cooling Cycle (FSCC) and a dual-thrust-chamber design, aimed at enabling upper-stage reusability.
Co-founder and CEO Manu J. Nair emphasized that achieving full reusability demands an integrated industrial ecosystem encompassing manufacturing, testing, qualification, and refurbishment. Co-founder Prashanth Sharma added that The Anchorage will facilitate testing from individual engine components and integrated propulsion systems to engine clusters and complete rocket stages, generating critical data to improve design and validate hardware.
The facility reflects The Guild’s commitment to building infrastructure necessary for the development and repeated operation of reusable launch vehicles, underscoring the increasing participation of private space technology companies in India’s space sector.
