HYDERABAD: Hyderabad-based space companies Dhruva Space and TakeMe2Space put their spacecraft into orbit aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 early on October 2, as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The mission also carried technologies developed by Ahmedabad-based SatLeo Labs and Hyderabad-based EON Space Labs.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California shortly after midnight IST with 130 payloads. Dhruva Space’s LEAP-2 hosted-payload platform was deployed around 1 am IST, followed by TakeMe2Space’s MOI-1A spacecraft.
For Dhruva Space, LEAP-2 is the second commercial mission under its Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Payloads (LEAP) programme, using its P-30 satellite platform. It carries a star tracker developed by France-based Sodern, an ArianeGroup company, and TAPAS-1, a thermal infrared Earth-observation sensor developed by SatLeo Labs.
The mission marks Dhruva Space’s move beyond satellite manufacturing into end-to-end mission delivery. The company handled the integration of LEAP-2 with the Falcon 9, building on LEAP-1, through which it became the first private Indian company to undertake in-house launch-vehicle integration of its satellite.
“LEAP-2 has demonstrated Dhruva Space’s ability to manage all mission segments end-to-end, from satellite and payload integration, deployer assembly and launch-vehicle integration to successful deployment in orbit,” CEO and co-founder Sanjay Nekkanti told TNIE.
Nekkanti: Spacecraft enters LEOP
The spacecraft has now entered the Launch Early Orbit Phase (LEOP), Nekkanti said.
Dhruva Space has a confirmed order pipeline covering more than 17 satellites over the next 36 months. It is also building a 280,000-sq-ft spacecraft manufacturing and testing campus in Hyderabad to support higher-volume production of satellites and subsystems, including space-grade solar panels.
For TakeMe2Space, MOI-1A is designed to demonstrate onboard processing of Earth-observation data, reducing the need to transmit large volumes of raw data to ground stations.
The spacecraft carries an Nvidia Orin NX-based computing system capable of 117 trillion operations per second, 2 TB of onboard storage and a nine-band multispectral imager.
MOI-1A replaces the company’s earlier MOI-1 spacecraft, which was lost in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January. TakeMe2Space subsequently secured another launch opportunity through SpaceX’s rideshare programme.
The company plans a six-satellite constellation for orbital computing services, targeting global coverage by 2027. It is also developing an orbital data-centre mission using 100-kg satellites with advanced computing and storage systems.
The mission also put EON Space Labs’ MIRA imaging system into orbit aboard TakeMe2Space’s spacecraft. Weighing 502 grams, MIRA is a miniaturised space-telescope imaging system designed to provide multispectral Earth-observation imagery for applications including agriculture, mining, marine services and insurance.