# The story and learnings from the Spaceonova years

_How we built Spaceonova while in college: the Python course, campus Guilds, 120,000 people, and a planned microgravity experiment with Skyroot._

By Rishikesh Ranjan · 2026-09-19 · https://rishikeshranjan.com/p/the-story-and-learnings-from-the-spaceonova-years

In June 2022, [The Times of India wrote about Spaceonova's plan to send a microgravity experiment into space on a Skyroot rocket](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/spaceonova-to-launch-indias-1st-commercial-experiment-in-space-on-skyroot-rocket/articleshow/92110500.cms). We had signed an MoU with Skyroot Aerospace. We also got incubated at the Atal Incubation Centre at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. There was a lot happening around the company by then.

But if I start with the launch agreement and the incubation, I miss most of what we actually did. Before any of that, there were two groups of people in two different colleges. Then a webinar. The courses, the college network, and the research work came as we kept building Spaceonova.

## It started with people we knew in college

I was at IIIT Bhubaneswar, and [Shivam](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivamksingh/), who was our CEO, was at Delhi University. Both of us knew people through college, so we started there. We each brought together a small group of people who were interested in space. Maybe you would call it a club or a society at that stage. My club became part of the tech society at IIIT Bhubaneswar.

There were people interested in astronomy, people interested in astrophysics, and people who wanted to get into space robotics. I was gathering all these people in my college while Shivam was doing it in his. So even at the beginning, the people coming into Spaceonova weren't all sitting in the same college. We were bringing our own groups into what we were building together.

The first thing we organized was a webinar. We had brought these groups together through the people we knew, and now we were organizing a session for them. That's where we began doing things together at Spaceonova, with the students we had gathered in our colleges.

After that we started talking to PhD researchers working in astronomy, astrophysics and space robotics. We kept getting in touch with people in the fields our audience was interested in. One of those people was [Shreya Santra](https://sites.google.com/view/shreya-santra?pli=1&authuser=0), who was doing her PhD in space robotics at Tohoku University in Japan when she joined Spaceonova. She's Dr. Shreya Santra now.

Those relationships became part of how we could do more than webinars. We had students who wanted to learn, and we were getting to know researchers who could teach them. Later, we asked some of those PhD researchers to create courses with us. They would teach, we would record the sessions, and we also did masterclasses. That's how the people we were speaking to became people we were working with.

## Finding something people wanted to learn

We started creating courses based on what most of the people we talked to found interesting. A lot of our audience came from engineering colleges, with people studying software. They were interested in space too. So there was a connection we could make between what they were already studying and the field they wanted to understand.

That became "Python and its space applications," a course [Soutik Nandy](https://www.linkedin.com/in/soutiknandy/) and I created while I was in college. We started with Python itself: what it is, how to understand it, and how to write programs with it. Then we taught applications related to simulation and astronomy.

Some of the students were in class 10, 11 or 12, maybe. So although a lot of the community around us came from engineering colleges, the course also had people who were earlier in their education. We couldn't assume that everybody already knew how to program. The Python basics were part of the course, and the space applications gave those basics something to connect to.

The course came out of those conversations about what people wanted to learn. Their answers helped Soutik and me decide what to make. Python gave us a way to connect what people were studying in software with their interest in space. They could start by learning to program and then see how that programming could be used in astronomy or a simulation.

We kept doing courses through 2020 and 2021. As more researchers joined us for teaching, we could work with what they knew as well as what our students were interested in. Soutik and I had created the Python course ourselves; for other courses, we approached people in our network and asked them to create one with us. The teaching grew along with those relationships.

At the same time, people from other colleges were coming to us because they wanted to join Spaceonova. We gave them something to do in their own college. Every time someone joined from another campus, we made them an ambassador. Their job was to create a club in their college. We called these clubs Spaceonova Guilds.

We got the idea from GirlScript. They had ambassador programs like this, and we thought we could adopt the model too. So we did. We started creating it college by college.

It was close to what Shivam and I had done at the beginning. Someone knew people in their college who were interested in space, and they brought those people together. With the Guilds, that could happen in colleges where neither of us studied. The person who had come to us wanting to join could now be the person starting a group for others.

That was also a way of giving people responsibility. Someone could come to us because they wanted to join Spaceonova, and we'd ask them to start a club in their college. That was the work they took on as an ambassador. They had a group of their own to bring together, as part of the company we were all working on.

By July 2022, more than 100 colleges were part of the network. There were a lot of students who wanted to work with us. Almost every single one of them was working with us just because they wanted to work with us. Their interest in space was bringing them in, and the clubs gave them a way to take part in the work.

But the Guilds weren't the only way we reached colleges. We also spent time searching the internet for colleges and pitching them directly. The pitch was simple: "we want to do this masterclass with your college only." We were offering to organize something specifically for their students.

So we had both things happening. People were starting clubs in their colleges, and we were reaching out to colleges ourselves with courses and masterclasses. The teaching gave us something to offer when we contacted a college. The college network, in turn, gave us more people to bring into those sessions.

We presented at IIIT Bhubaneswar. Then Soutik and [Jishant Talwar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jishant-talwar/) conducted a session on Python and its space applications at IIT Delhi's TRYST tech fest. It was around an hour or two. IIT Delhi was a high point for us at the time. A course Soutik and I had put together was now something our team was teaching at their tech fest.

[Jishant's post about the IIT Delhi session on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jishant-talwar_lecture-space-python-activity-6921786079532445697-pP4W)

And the people joining weren't only from India. People outside India wanted to participate too, so we had to create a PayPal account to accept their payments. That was another part of running the company. If someone wanted to join a course from another country, we needed to make it possible for them to pay for it.

We ended up with more than 120,000 unique people in our database, from India and outside India. I'm talking about the people in that database, not saying that 120,000 people all bought a course. The number includes our wider audience. The clubs and courses had grown well beyond the people Shivam and I personally knew when we started.

## Moving into microgravity research

Alongside the education work, we were also getting into research. In early 2022, we were working on an experiment involving extremophiles in microgravity. That brought a different kind of work into Spaceonova. We were still running education programs, but we were also working towards an experiment that would need to go to space.

At the time, Skyroot Aerospace was preparing for a launch. We signed an MoU with them for our planned experiment, and the company got incubated at the Atal Incubation Centre at CCMB in Hyderabad. This was the point where the research had a launch agreement attached to it, as well as an incubation program.

That's what the June 2022 article was about. The plan was to send a microgravity research platform on Skyroot's Vikram-I. It was a planned mission, and getting to that stage was a high point for us. We had started by organizing people and teaching courses. Now the company was working on the research side too, with an agreement to send an experiment into space.

The experiment didn't fly with Skyroot. There were several reasons, but the main one was that our incubation timeline didn't align with the launch timeline. Both things were happening, but their schedules didn't come together for us to send the experiment on that launch.

So the June announcement described what we were planning to send. The MoU and the incubation both happened, and they were a big part of what we did at Spaceonova. Getting our experiment onto that launch didn't happen. The article captures the plan we had reached at that point in 2022.

## Stepping back from the daily work

Around that time, I also had to make a decision about what I could earn. My family had loans, and I needed to earn enough to help with that. Spaceonova was a company we had built and were running, but I had to look at my own earning needs alongside what was happening there.

So I stepped back from day-to-day operations and took a job in the founder's office at CloutFlow. Creating the course with Soutik, finding colleges, and bringing people into Spaceonova had been my work. Now I needed to earn through a job, and my daily work moved there.

I moved into AI after that. I'm still in touch with Soutik about what's happening. Stepping back from the daily operations didn't mean we stopped talking about the company.