GalaxEye said today that it had lost contact with OptoSat, the world’s first satellite of its kind, but concerns around the satellite’s health had been raised since immediately after its launch by an X account.
GalaxEye confirmed on Tuesday that Mission Drishti, the satellite it had spent four years and over 80 engineers building, is very likely lost. The Bengaluru startup said the spacecraft ran into an anomaly during the final stage of its Launch and Early Orbit Phase, triggered by a geomagnetic solar storm that appears to have damaged a critical onboard system. Contact turned intermittent and then stopped altogether. GalaxEye says recovery efforts are still on, but the odds of getting the satellite back are low.
For anyone who had been following the satellite tracking community on X since launch day, this wasn’t a surprise. An account called @Astro_Neel, a space communication handle, had been pointing at Drishti’s orbital behaviour since the first week after launch, and had a fairly public back-and-forth with GalaxEye’s own CEO about it.
The first flag, and the CEO’s reply
Drishti launched on May 3 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, becoming the world’s first OptoSAR imaging satellite and the largest privately built spacecraft to come out of India. Four days later, on May 7, Astro_Neel posted that publicly available SatNOGS data showed Drishti tumbling in orbit at around 3 degrees per second, or one full rotation roughly every two minutes, ever since deployment. The post linked directly to the SatNOGS observation logs and noted that the satellite was, in the account’s words, nowhere close to being three-axis stabilised.
GalaxEye founder and CEO Suyash Singh replied the next day, on May 8. His response leaned on the scale of what GalaxEye had attempted rather than the specific tumbling numbers, pointing out that no private Indian company had launched a SAR satellite anywhere near 190 kg before, and asking Astro_Neel to share fresh analysis given the data being cited was already a few days old by then. He asked the community to hold on, saying that if something was genuinely wrong with the satellite, GalaxEye would say so itself.
Astro_Neel’s reply, also on May 8, pushed back on the framing, noting that Singh’s response hadn’t actually denied any of the tumbling claims, and linked to a fresh set of ground station passes, including one from under an hour earlier, showing similar rotation rates. The account also turned Singh’s own point around, arguing that a satellite of this mass class from a private Indian player was exactly the kind of thing that would draw more scrutiny, not less.
The trail went quiet, then so did the satellite
The exchanges didn’t stop there. On May 12, replying to a user asking for an update, Astro_Neel simply wrote “Ngmi” — not going to make it. By May 18, the account had gone further, noting that the last significant burst of RF activity from Drishti had been recorded on May 15, and that the extended radio silence since then suggested either a power problem or a safe mode being triggered. The account’s assessment by that point was blunt: it wasn’t looking good for the satellite.
That turned out to be roughly where things stood. GalaxEye’s statement this week describes Drishti as having established communication and completed a major part of its early orbit phase, validating attitude control, onboard computing, deployment mechanisms and communications along the way, before the anomaly tied to the geomagnetic storm set in. Contact became intermittent and was eventually lost.
What GalaxEye is saying now
GalaxEye is framing the mission as a technical success despite the loss, crediting it with proving out its in-house Mission Control Centre in Bengaluru and generating engineering lessons it plans to carry into two new OptoSAR satellites over the next 24 months.
What the company hasn’t done is connect the dots explicitly between the tumbling behaviour flagged in May and the anomaly it’s now attributing to space weather. Whether the two are related, or whether Drishti genuinely stabilised at some point before the solar storm hit, isn’t something GalaxEye has addressed. What’s on the record is a timeline: independent trackers on X were describing Drishti’s orbital instability using public data within days of launch, weeks before the company’s own account of a failed mission became official.