The Story
TakeMe2Space will fly two satellites carrying GPUs and storage on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in late 2028, in what the Hyderabad company describes as India's first networked orbital data centre mission.
The two 100-kilogram MOI satellites will launch as part of the Waymaker 2 rideshare mission, operated by SEOPS, to a sun-synchronous orbit at about 500 kilometres. The slot was secured through Paris-based RIDE! space under a launch service agreement.
Each spacecraft will generate about 1.5 kilowatts of power and carry 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs, 100 terabytes of storage and a one-metre multispectral imager. Optical inter-satellite links will let the two share workloads and data, testing whether separate satellites can function as a single distributed computing system. The company plans a six-satellite constellation.
Founder and chief executive Ronak Kumar Samantray said everything flown so far had been about proving that compute belongs in orbit, and that these two satellites are about proving it at a scale that pays.
The mission will also demonstrate attitude determination and control designed in India, built on domestically developed reaction wheels, star trackers and fine sun sensors, including the StarSense star tracker introduced in June with support from IN-SPACe's Technology Adoption Fund.
Two earlier missions come first. MOI-1a is scheduled for 1 October on SpaceX's Transporter-18, with orbital injection expected by 8 October through a D-Orbit transfer vehicle. MOI-1b is due on an ISRO Small Satellite Launch Vehicle later this year.
The company's MOI-1 satellite was lost in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January. Its PowerBank-50 satellite battery flew on Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 in July. Founded in 2023, TakeMe2Space raised a $5 million seed round led by Chiratae Ventures.
Why It Matters
The case for putting computers in space is not about computing power. It is about bandwidth.
An Earth observation satellite generates far more imagery than it can send down. Ground station passes are short, downlink capacity is limited, and most of what a satellite captures is discarded or never transmitted. A one-metre multispectral imager running continuously produces vastly more data than any radio link can carry to Earth.
Processing on board inverts that. Instead of sending pixels and analysing them later, the satellite runs the model itself and transmits the conclusion: this field is stressed, that vessel is where it should not be. A few kilobytes rather than gigabytes. The constraint stops being how much can be sent and becomes how much can be computed.
That is what the 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs and 100 terabytes per satellite are for, and it is why the optical inter-satellite links matter as much as the processors. Two spacecraft sharing a workload over a laser link is the difference between two computers in orbit and a computing system in orbit, which is the thing being tested.
The company is honest about the stage it is at. Samantray's description of these as the smallest unit that behaves like an orbital data centre is a claim about proving a design, not about running one. And the record supplies the caveat: MOI-1 was lost on PSLV-C62 in January, before any of this could be demonstrated.
Ronak Kumar Samantray, founder and chief executive of TakeMe2Space, on the two satellites: they are \"the smallest unit of an orbital data centre that actually behaves like one.\"
The Strategic Read
Set beside the terrestrial version, the appeal of computing in orbit becomes clearer than the phrase suggests.
Data centres on the ground have spent this year running into limits that have nothing to do with chips. Scotland now requires an environmental impact assessment for every facility above 50MW. Campaigners there noted that four pending applications would draw as much power as a nuclear station. Communities object, grids are constrained, and water for cooling is contested.
A satellite has none of those problems. Power comes from sunlight, cooling from vacuum, and nobody lives underneath it. The constraint is mass to orbit and the cost of getting it there, which has fallen by roughly an order of magnitude over the past decade and continues to fall.
The scale gap remains enormous. Two satellites at 1.5 kilowatts each is three kilowatts of compute. A single terrestrial AI campus is measured in hundreds of megawatts. Nothing about this displaces a data centre on Earth, and it is not meant to.
What it could displace is the ground station. If Earth observation satellites process their own imagery and downlink answers instead of pixels, the economics of the whole category change, because bandwidth rather than sensing has long been the binding constraint.
For India there is a familiar pattern in the launch arrangement. The largest mission goes on a Falcon 9, while MOI-1b flies on an ISRO SSLV. Indian space companies keep building payloads and buying rides, and the interesting hardware keeps reaching orbit on somebody else's rocket.
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