In a major step towards building a data centre in space, Hyderabad-based TakeMe2Space will fly India’s first networked orbital data centre mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2028. The company plans to build a constellation of six satellites over the next few years.
TakeMe2Space said it will fly two 100-kilogram (kg) MOI (My Orbital Infrastructure) constellation satellites on a Falcon 9 as part of the Waymaker 2 rideshare mission, with a launch window in late 2028, under a launch service agreement signed with RIDE! space, the launch mission management company that secured the slot.
“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 half kilowatt (kW) of power, a 1-metre imager and a laser link between spacecraft are the smallest unit of an orbital data centre that actually behaves like one,” said Ronak Kumar Samantray, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of TakeMe2Space.
The mission puts an Indian company on the timeline of a global push to move computing into orbit. Starcloud in the US flew the first Nvidia Hopper 100 graphics processing unit (H100 GPU) in space in November 2025 and has since raised $170 million, while Google has said it will fly prototype Project Suncatcher satellites with Planet Labs by early 2027. Most of that work involves a single spacecraft carrying a large processor. Waymaker 2 will test the other half of the problem: whether two spacecraft can behave as one computer.
TakeMe2Space’s first mission, MOI-TD (Technology Demonstrator), was launched on December 30, 2024, and ran more than 20 experiments in low Earth orbit. MOI-1 was lost in the PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle)-C62 launch failure in January 2026.
“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 1.5 kW 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 two spacecraft are the Hyderabad company’s first data centre-class satellites, following MOI-1a, which is scheduled to launch on October 1 on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission, with orbital injection expected by October 8 via a D-Orbit orbital transfer vehicle and launch and early orbit phase operations targeted for completion by October 16, and MOI-1b, which is also scheduled to launch in 2026.
Each will generate about 1.5 kW of power to run computing workloads in orbit, hosting 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs and 100 terabytes (TB) of storage. The pair will be linked by optical inter-satellite links so that workloads and data can be shared between them, making this the first Indian mission designed to network computing across spacecraft rather than run it on a single satellite.
The satellites are TDs for the next generation of orbital data centre spacecraft. Their primary objective is to run high-performance computing in orbit and prove its practical use, processing data where it is generated rather than transmitting large volumes of raw data to ground stations. A satellite typically collects far more data than it can send down, and downlink time, rather than sensor capacity, is what limits how much of it reaches a user.
The first application is Earth observation. Each satellite carries a multispectral imager with a ground sampling distance of about 1 metre, while the OrbitLab platform supplies the onboard compute to process and analyse that imagery directly in orbit. Workloads run on the spacecraft to extract what matters before downlink, demonstrating near-real-time analytics, intelligent image processing, data reduction, and selective downlinking. A user asking for flood extent, a ship count or a crop-stress map receives the answer, not the raw frames.
The two spacecraft also carry the infrastructure needed to scale into future orbital data centres. Each hosts 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs and 100 TB of onboard storage, a power system generating and handling about 1.5 kW, high-performance thermal management and optical inter-satellite links. The optical links allow workloads and data to move between spacecraft at high speed, turning standalone orbital computers into a networked, distributed computing infrastructure in space.
The power system uses silicon solar cells rather than the gallium arsenide (GaAs) cells that are the industry standard for spacecraft. Silicon cells cost a fraction of GaAs cells, and the choice brings down the cost of each satellite, which could translate into lower pricing for customers running workloads on the platform.
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 (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre’s) Technology Adoption Fund. The system meets the pointing requirements of both the imaging payload and future compute-intensive applications.
Waymaker 2 is the second mission in the Waymaker dedicated rideshare programme operated by SEOPS (Satellite & Extraterrestrial Operations & Procedures), flying on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to a sun-synchronous orbit at about 500 kilometres. TakeMe2Space secured its slot on the mission through RIDE! space, the Paris-based launch mission management company founded in 2020, which has been a SEOPS partner since 2024 and holds capacity on the Waymaker programme for its customers.
The agreement follows a year in which TakeMe2Space closed a $5 million seed round led by Chiratae Ventures, lost its MOI-1 satellite in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January, scheduled MOI-1a for launch on October 1 and MOI-1b for launch in 2026, and saw its PowerBank-50 battery earn flight heritage on Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 in July. The company has set out a path from a single spacecraft to a constellation delivering about 5 kW of orbital compute, with a longer-term target of a 50-kW orbital data centre.
Waymaker 2 is the step between those two stages. OrbitLab, combined with an Earth-observation payload, turns a satellite from a data-collection platform into a computing and data-processing platform in orbit, and the two spacecraft on this mission are the first built to that design at data-centre scale.
The company also designs and manufactures two dozen satellite subsystems and test systems in-house, including the PowerBank-50 battery, which earned flight heritage on Skyroot’s Vikram-1 in July this year.
