Hyderabad-based spacetech startup TakeMe2Space plans to launch what it describes as India’s first networked orbital data centre mission on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in 2028, using two 100-kilogram satellites to process Earth-observation data in orbit.
The satellites will fly on the Waymaker-2 rideshare mission to an approximately 500-kilometre sun-synchronous orbit. Launch capacity has been secured through Paris-based RIDE! Space in partnership with SEOPS, according to TakeMe2Space and RIDE! Space.
Each spacecraft is planned to carry 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs, 100 terabytes of storage, a one-metre multispectral imager and power generation capacity of about 1.5 kilowatts. Optical inter-satellite links will allow the two satellites to share workloads and data, testing whether separate spacecraft can function as a distributed computing system.
TakeMe2Space founder and chief executive officer Ronak Kumar Samantray told the Times of India that the mission would serve as a technology demonstrator for a new generation of orbital data-centre spacecraft. The company’s Orbit Lab platform is expected to run analytics onboard, allowing users to receive processed products such as flood maps, ship counts and crop-stress assessments rather than complete raw image files.
The approach is designed to reduce the volume of raw Earth-observation imagery that must be transmitted to ground stations. Instead of downlinking full image frames for processing on Earth, the satellites would identify and transmit selected information products. The company said the system would support artificial-intelligence workloads and selective downlinking in orbit.
“Everything we have flown so far has been about proving that compute belongs in orbit,” Samantray said, describing the two satellites as an effort to demonstrate orbital computing at a larger operational scale. He said the combination of power, imaging capability and a laser link represented the smallest unit of an orbital data centre that could operate as an integrated system.
Valentin Benoit, chief executive officer of RIDE! Space, said the mission represented a payload category defined by what it computes rather than what it carries. The launch provider will place the spacecraft into orbit as part of the rideshare mission, subject to the planned 2028 schedule.
The mission will also test fine pointing and precision attitude control. TakeMe2Space said the system was designed in India and would use domestically developed reaction wheels, star trackers and fine sun sensors. It includes the Star Sense star tracker introduced by the company in June with support from IN-SPACe’s Technology Adoption Fund.
The planned 2028 mission follows two nearer-term flights by the company. TakeMe2Space is preparing its MOI-1a mission for October 1 on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission and its MOI-1b mission on a forthcoming ISRO Small Satellite Launch Vehicle mission later this year. The Hyderabad company’s MOI-1 satellite was lost in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January. It also recently demonstrated its Power Bank-50 satellite battery on Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 launch on July 18.
The two Falcon 9-bound satellites are intended to establish whether onboard processing, distributed spacecraft computing and laser-linked data exchange can operate together in a commercial Earth-observation mission. The next formal milestones are the planned MOI-1a and MOI-1b launches before the proposed Waymaker-2 mission in 2028.
