Hyderabad: Spacetech startup TakeMe2Space is all set to fly India’s first networked orbital data centre mission on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in 2028 with two 100 kg MOI constellation satellites equipped with 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs each, even as it is gearing up for its MOI-1a mission on Oct 1 this year on board SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission and MOI-1b on board ISRO’s upcoming SSLV mission after that later this year.The Hyderabad-based MOI-1a mission comes over nine months after it lost its MOI-1 satellite in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January this year. The company recently proved its PowerBank-50 satellite battery on Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 launch on July 18 this year.TakeMe2Space founder & CEO Ronak Kumar Samantray told TOI that apart from 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs, each of its 100-kg satellites will have 100 TB of storage and a one-metre multispectral imager and will generate about 1.5 kW of power.Optical inter-satellite links will allow the pair of satellites to share workloads and data, testing whether two spacecraft can operate as a distributed computer rather than separate platforms.The satellites will ride on the Waymaker-2 rideshare mission on board Falcon 9 to a roughly 500-km sun-synchronous orbit, through capacity secured by Paris-based RIDE! Space in partnership with SEOPS.Samantray said the two satellites will serve as technology demonstrators for the next generation of orbital data centre spacecraft. They will collect and process Earth-observation data in space, reducing the need to downlink raw imagery.He said users could receive products such as flood maps, ship counts or crop-stress analysis instead of full image frames with the company’s OrbitLab platform running onboard analytics, selective downlinking and AI workloads in orbit.“Everything we have flown so far has been about proving that compute belongs in orbit. These two satellites are about proving it at a scale that pays. One and a 1.5kW of power, a one-metre imager and a laser link between spacecraft is the smallest unit of an orbital data centre that actually behaves like one,” Samantray said.“TakeMe2Space is bringing a new class of payload to rideshare, one that is defined by what it computes rather than what it carries. Getting two 100 kg spacecraft with laser links and a kilowatt of power onto Waymaker-2 on schedule is exactly the kind of mission our platform exists for,” said Valentin Benoit, CEO of RIDE! Space.The mission will also demonstrate fine pointing and precision attitude control through an attitude determination and control architecture designed in India and built on domestically developed reaction wheels, star trackers and fine sun sensors, including the StarSense star tracker the company introduced in June with support from IN-SPACe’s Technology Adoption Fund. The system meets the pointing requirements of both the imaging payload and future compute-intensive applications, TakeMe2Space said.
