The Guild unveils 150-acre Rocket testing facility near Sriharikota

New Delhi, Oct 16 (UNI) Private space technology company Ethereal Exploration Guild (The Guild) has unveiled The Anchorage, a 150-acre rocket development and testing facility in Space City, Andhra Pradesh, located approximately 40 kilometres from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC SHAR) at Sriharikota.
The facility is being developed to support Razor Crest Mk-1 (RCM1), The Guild's fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle, designed to recover and reuse both its booster and upper stage.

The Anchorage will bring together propulsion testing, stage qualification, manufacturing, vehicle integration and refurbishment infrastructure to support the rocket's development and future operations. The facility's operational core is the commissioned Pegasus Horizontal Static Test Facility, which supports component-level testing, ignition trials, thrust-chamber and turbomachinery testing, and integrated engine firing. With a pressure-fed test capability rated at 210 bar, the facility is designed to enable detailed characterisation of engine hardware and subsystems.

Pegasus, an 80 kN semi-cryogenic upper-stage engine, is central to RCM1's reusable upper-stage architecture. Its first hot-fire test is scheduled for November 2026 at The Anchorage.

The engine incorporates The Guild's proprietary Full-Flow Segregated Cooling Cycle (FSCC) and a dual thrust-chamber architecture. Developed in-house, FSCC is intended to address the thermal and operational demands of recovering an upper stage from orbit and preparing it for repeated flights.

Alongside Pegasus testing, The Guild is developing the Stallion Vertical Test Facility to support its 1.2 MN gas-generator booster engine. Stallion is designed to power RCM1 during liftoff and atmospheric ascent.

The proposed vertical test infrastructure will accommodate individual engine firings and clustered-engine tests, allowing the company to progress from single-engine qualification to evaluating multiple engines operating together in the launch vehicle's booster configuration.

"The Anchorage represents a long-term investment in the capacity development required to test, manufacture and repeatedly operate Razor Crest Mk-1," said Manu J. Nair, co-founder and CEO of The Guild. "Full reusability is not achieved by vehicle design alone. It demands an integrated industrial ecosystem where manufacturing, qualification and refurbishment are engineered to work together throughout the vehicle's operational life," Nair said.

Beyond propulsion testing, The Anchorage is planned to house integrated stage-testing infrastructure that will bring together propulsion systems, propellant tanks, feed systems, structures, avionics, controls and flight software. The objective is to assess how these systems operate together before qualified booster and upper stages proceed to vehicle assembly and integration. "An engine test establishes propulsion performance. Stage qualification examines how that propulsion system operates with the tanks, feed systems, structures, avionics and controls," said Prashanth Sharma, co-founder and CTO of The Guild. Sharma said the facility's development would follow a progression from Pegasus component testing and integrated firings to Stallion engine-cluster trials and complete-stage qualification, with test data informing engineering decisions and hardware qualification.

Planned manufacturing capabilities include stage-tank fabrication, machining, forming, welding, additive manufacturing and post-processing, as well as the development of critical cryogenic flow components. Integrating these capabilities with testing and engineering is intended to shorten the feedback loop between qualification results, design changes and subsequent hardware iterations.

The company also plans to establish refurbishment infrastructure for inspecting flown booster and upper-stage hardware, assessing operating history and remaining service life, carrying out repairs or component replacements, and requalifying hardware before subsequent flights.

The Anchorage represents The Guild's effort to establish an industrial base around the full operational lifecycle of a reusable launch vehicle, from manufacturing and qualification to post-flight inspection and return to service.

The company says the facility's continued development will expand its capabilities beyond commissioned high-pressure propulsion testing to include meganewton-class engine testing, clustered propulsion, integrated-stage qualification and hardware refurbishment. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Bengaluru, The Guild is developing Razor Crest Mk-1 as a fully reusable medium-lift launch vehicle aimed at commercial and sovereign satellite operators. The company says the vehicle is intended to reduce launch costs, improve launch cadence and enable multi-polar access to space.UNI AAB