Three very different pieces of Indian space hardware are on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission: a thermal imaging payload, a satellite that runs AI models in orbit, and a platform built to carry other companies’ experiments. All three were authorised by IN-SPACe, the government’s space regulator and promotion body.
The flight was highlighted by IN-SPACe Chairman Pawan Goenka, who called it a “genuinely big day” for India’s private space sector on X. He pointed to the spread of what’s on board: orbital computing, thermal intelligence and a homegrown hosting platform, all on one launch.
Here is what each of them is, and why they stand out.
TAPAS-1: India’s first commercial thermal imaging payload from a private company
Built by Ahmedabad-based SatLeo Labs, TAPAS-1 (Thermal Access Platform for Analytics & Solutions) is being described as India’s first commercial thermal imaging payload built by a private company.
The reason it matters comes down to what thermal sensing can see that ordinary cameras cannot. An optical camera captures reflected sunlight. A thermal sensor captures heat, which means it can pick up crop stress before it is visible to the eye, spot forest fires, and map how hot different parts of a city get. Goenka listed crop stress, forest fires and urban heat as the use cases.
TAPAS-1 is an experimental payload, a stepping stone rather than the finished product. SatLeo says it designed and delivered the payload for satellite integration within six months and brought it to TRL-8, a readiness level that sits just below full operational use. The real goal is a constellation. The company has outlined plans for sub-10-metre resolution thermal and visible imaging, with coverage twice a day, using both mid-wave and long-wave infrared bands: the former aimed at urban heat, defence and industrial uses, the latter at agriculture and environmental monitoring. It also plans to sell subscription access to fused historical and live thermal datasets, along with analytics on top.
The company is young and still small. It raised a $2.2 million seed round led by Unicorn India Ventures in April 2026, taking its total funding to $5.5 million, and has grown its team from 8 to around 30. It has already started pilot projects on urban heat and air pollution monitoring in Ahmedabad and Tumakuru.
Thermal is a crowded field globally, with companies like Satellite Vu in the UK, OroraTech in Germany and Hydrosat in the US already working on it. SatLeo’s pitch is India-based engineering and lower costs. Having an actual payload in orbit is the first real test of that pitch.
MOI-1A: an AI computer in orbit
TakeMe2Space, the Hyderabad startup behind MOI-1A, is taking a different approach to a familiar problem: satellites collect far more data than they can send down to Earth.
Instead of beaming back raw imagery and letting customers process it on the ground, MOI-1A carries Nvidia Orin NX edge-computing processors and runs AI models on board. Customers upload containerised models, the satellite runs them when it passes over a chosen area, and only the results come back. The company’s own example is a crop-health index returned directly to a farming customer, with no need to buy and crunch large volumes of imagery.
The satellite weighs under 50 kg and has roughly 150 watts of power to work with. That is worth being clear about: it is an edge-computing satellite, not an orbital data centre in the sense that SpaceX or Starcloud are talking about, who plan to use the more powerful chips found in terrestrial data centres. TakeMe2Space has said as much, and describes MOI-1A as a first-generation product.
It has also signed up 23 customers for the mission, including GIS companies and educational institutions, with US-based Little Place Labs among them. Founder and CEO Ronak Kumar Samantray, who previously built the software company NowFloats, says the sweet spot is customers who currently pay to download large amounts of raw data just to compute on it later.
The mission also carries some history. TakeMe2Space’s earlier technology demonstrator, MOI-TD, flew on 30 December 2024. Its first operational satellite, MOI-1, was lost when ISRO’s PSLV-C62 failed on 12 January 2026. MOI-1A is the replacement, and the move to a Falcon 9 reflects a wider shift among Indian startups looking for reliable and quick access to orbit after the PSLV setbacks.
Longer term, the company plans a six-satellite constellation, and has announced a networked orbital data centre mission of two 100 kg satellites on a Falcon 9 in late 2028, each with Nvidia GPUs, storage and laser links between spacecraft.
LEAP-2: a satellite you can rent a seat on
The third flight is Dhruva Space’s LEAP-2, which carries four payloads and is meant to show off the company’s platform for hosting other people’s experiments in space.
LEAP stands for Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Payloads. The idea is simple: instead of building your own satellite just to test one instrument, you bolt it onto Dhruva’s ready-made bus, which is called P-30, and the company also handles launch integration, ground station support and mission management. The pitch to startups, universities and foreign companies is a cheaper and faster way to validate technology in orbit, in a market where flight opportunities are scarce.
The P-30 has been through this before. It was space-qualified in January 2024 on ISRO’s PSLV-C58 mission, and Dhruva’s first commercial mission, LEAP-1, flew on a Falcon 9 in August 2025, carrying an AI module from Australia’s Akula Tech and a hyperspectral imager from Esper Satellites. French firm Sodern had announced it would demonstrate its HORUS star tracker on LEAP-2.
Dhruva is among the better-funded names in the sector. The Hyderabad company has raised roughly $24 million across equity, venture debt and grants, including a ₹105 crore grant from the government’s RDI fund for a 500 kg-class satellite platform called Project Garud.
Why this flight matters
Taken together, the three missions cover three layers of a space business: sensing (what you can see from orbit), computing (what you do with it up there) and infrastructure (who gets to fly at all). They also arrive at a time when the sector is trying to prove it can move from experimentation to commercial revenue. Goenka has said India now has around 450 space startups, with about 20 at a stage where they are ready to scale.
It is also a reminder of how much Indian space startups now depend on foreign rockets. The country’s private launch efforts, like Skyroot’s first private rocket, are still early, and the PSLV’s recent failures have pushed satellite makers towards rideshares on Falcon 9. Others in the ecosystem, such as Pixxel, have already shown that Indian-built satellites can win international customers.
The hard part starts after deployment. Each of these companies now has to show that what works in orbit also works as a business: that customers will pay for thermal data, for compute in space, and for a seat on someone else’s satellite. Goenka’s wish for “a clean deployment and a long innings in orbit” will be the first test of that.