Susmita Mohanty

Here’s how Susmita Mohanty started India’s first private space company.

Susmita Mohanty is a space entrepreneur.

Wait, no, that’s too reductive.

She’s the only person in the world to have co-founded space ventures in North America, Europe, and Asia.

In 2001, she launched Moonfront in San Francisco.

An aerospace consulting firm working with NASA and ESA.

In 2004, she co-founded Liquifer Systems Group in Vienna.

A space architecture studio that pioneered a new genre called Trans-Gravity, blurring the line between Earth and space habitats.

In 2009, she came back to India and built Earth2Orbit.

The country’s first private space startup.

At a time when India and the U.S. were still working through the aftershocks of the 1998 sanctions, Susmita spent five years unlocking a cross-border breakthrough.

She negotiated the first-ever launch agreement between an American satellite company (Skybox) and India’s Antrix Corporation.

It involved dozens of diplomats, State Department approvals, and years of bureaucracy.

The deal finally got signed.

A mini Berlin Wall came down.

And that partnership opened the floodgates for other American satellites to fly on India’s PSLV rocket.

She called it “technology diplomacy.”

And she made it work, without a badge, a budget, or an army of lawyers.

Just grit, fluency in five cultures, and a deep understanding of both policy and propulsion.

Before her entrepreneurial run, she worked at Boeing on the International Space Station program and on Shuttle-Mir missions at NASA.

She’s since advised ESA, ISRO, governments, investors, and universities across the globe.

In 2021, she launched Spaceport SARABHAI: India’s first space think tank.

Its mission: to grow India’s influence in global space policy, provide research-backed recommendations to the government, and help transform India into a developed space economy by 2030.

She’s been invited to both the Arctic and Antarctica.

She helped kids in Oakland escape gang violence through a space education nonprofit.

And she’s been named to BBC’s 100 Most Influential Women in 2019.