India’s much publicized OptoSAR mission hasn’t gone as planned.
Bengaluru-based space startup GalaxEye has confirmed that Mission Drishti, its flagship satellite and the world’s first to combine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) with optical imaging on a single platform, has gone silent in orbit following an anomaly linked to a geomagnetic solar storm. The company said contact with the spacecraft became intermittent before being lost entirely, and while recovery attempts are still underway, it has admitted that the odds of restoring the connection now look slim.
Drishti launched aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission on May 3, carrying with it the tag of India’s largest privately built satellite. It was designed to fuse radar and multispectral optical data in a single pass, producing imagery that works day or night and through cloud cover, something neither sensor could pull off on its own. The launch drew attention well beyond the space industry, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulating the team on X, calling it a testament to Indian youth building for the nation.
According to GalaxEye, the satellite completed most of its Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) successfully. It established communication, validated its deployment mechanisms, and demonstrated working attitude control, onboard computing, and comms systems. The company’s Mission Control Centre in Bengaluru also got to prove out its ability to run a satellite operation end to end, which GalaxEye is framing as a win in itself regardless of what happened next.
What happened next was the anomaly. GalaxEye says the issue surfaced during the final stage of LEOP, coinciding with an extreme space weather event. Preliminary findings point to radiation from the geomagnetic storm affecting a critical onboard system, after which the satellite’s signal started dropping in and out before going quiet for good. The company hasn’t specified which subsystem took the hit, and it’s the kind of detail that space watchers will be pressing for once a fuller post-mortem is out.
CEO Suyash Singh addressed the setback directly, calling Mission Drishti the product of years of engineering by the team and pointing to the operational data gathered before the loss of contact as something the company can build on. He also said GalaxEye is now pulling more of its supply chain, manufacturing, and satellite development in-house, a move aimed at giving the company tighter control over the parts of the process that are hardest to troubleshoot from the ground when something goes wrong 500 km up.
Despite the loss, GalaxEye isn’t backing off the OptoSAR bet. The company has announced plans to launch two next-generation OptoSAR satellites within the next 24 months, incorporating whatever engineering lessons came out of Drishti’s short life in orbit. Given that Drishti was meant to be the first of a planned 10-satellite constellation built for a two-day global revisit time, the setback puts a dent in that timeline without derailing it outright.
GalaxEye’s advisory board includes names from DRDO, ISRO, and Swiss Re, and the company had already signed a deal with NewSpace India Limited to resell its imagery products globally. For now, that commercial pipeline will have to wait on satellites that haven’t been built yet, while the one already in the sky stays dark.