As children, many of us dreamed of becoming astronauts. We gazed at the night sky, imagined floating weightlessly among stars, and built cardboard rockets in our backyards. But somewhere along the way, reality hit hard — college degrees, corporate jobs, EMIs, and nine-to-five routines to the place of those grand spacefaring dreams.

Yet for some, that spark never dimmed.

At just 21, Snehadeep Kumar from Durgapur, West Bengal, is turning his childhood fascination into reality. Along with Mohit Kumar Nayak, a Computer Science student from Bhubaneswar, they are working to democratise space research, starting with building India’s first gamma-ray detection CubeSat through their student-led space startup, ‘Nebula Space Organisation.’

Their story is not just about chasing dreams but about making them accessible to others, too.

A dream crafted by an encyclopedia

Snehadeep’s journey began innocuously in Class 1, when his father handed him an encyclopedia and switched the television to the Discovery Channel. Space, in all its vastness and mystery, hooked him immediately.

“The idea of becoming a scientist started when I was very young,” Snehadeep tells The Better India. “Every competition, every project I did after that always somehow circled back to space and satellites.”

By Class 9, Snehadeep had built a model to demonstrate groundwater replenishment using morning cauliflower seeds for a science exhibition. A teacher’s offhand comment — that he should publish his work — planted another seed: what if there was a scientific journal that welcomed work from high-schoolers, students often sidelined by academic publishing?

Three years later, that idea took form as Aurora Academy Journal. Fueled by connections made through Discord, Snehadeep gathered a global team of like-minded teenagers who created a platform for young researchers to publish their research worldwide.

“We had 40 members from 15 countries. We cold-emailed Nobel laureates, and to our surprise, many responded positively,” he says. Interviews with icons like Babar Ali, the world’s youngest headmaster, and Nobel Laureate Robert Lefkowitz followed. Aurora became more than a journal; it was a youth-driven scientific movement.

But the hunger to do more persisted.

Challenging the space monopoly

In late 2021, Snehadeep and his growing team realised another massive gap in the ecosystem: access to space research and equipment was........

© The Better India