India's TakeMe2Space to Launch First Orbital Data Centre on SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2028

Hyderabad-based TakeMe2Space has signed a launch service agreement to fly India's first networked orbital data centre mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in late 2028, marking a significant step in the global race to move computing infrastructure into space. The company plans to build a constellation of six satellites over the coming years, positioning itself alongside international players such as Starcloud and Google in the emerging orbital computing sector.

Under the agreement with Paris-based RIDE! space, the launch mission management company that secured the slot, TakeMe2Space will fly two 100-kilogram MOI (My Orbital Infrastructure) constellation satellites on a Falcon 9 as part of the Waymaker 2 rideshare mission, with a launch window in late 2028. The mission will be operated under the Waymaker dedicated rideshare programme by SEOPS (Satellite & Extraterrestrial Operations & Procedures), flying to a sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 500 kilometres.

"Everything we have flown so far has been about proving that compute belongs in orbit. These two satellites are about proving it at a scale that pays. One and a half kilowatt of power, a 1-metre imager and a laser link between spacecraft are the smallest unit of an orbital data centre that actually behaves like one," said Ronak Kumar Samantray, founder and CEO of TakeMe2Space.

The two spacecraft will each generate about 1.5 kW of power to run computing workloads in orbit, hosting 10 Nvidia Thor GPUs and 100 terabytes of storage. They will be linked by optical inter-satellite links, enabling workloads and data to be shared between them at high speed. This makes the mission the first Indian effort designed to network computing across spacecraft rather than run it on a single satellite, turning standalone orbital computers into a distributed computing infrastructure in space.

The mission places an Indian company on the timeline of a global push to move computing into orbit. Starcloud in the US flew the first Nvidia H100 GPU in space in November 2025 and has since raised $170 million, while Google has announced plans to fly prototype Project Suncatcher satellites with Planet Labs by early 2027. Most of that work involves a single spacecraft carrying a large processor. Waymaker 2 will test the other half of the problem: whether two spacecraft can behave as one computer.

"TakeMe2Space is bringing a new class of payload to rideshare, one that is defined by what it computes rather than what it carries. Getting two 100-kg spacecraft with laser links and 1.5 kW of power onto Waymaker 2 on schedule is exactly the kind of mission our platform exists for," said Valentin Benoit, CEO of RIDE! space.

The satellites are technology demonstrators for the next generation of orbital data centre spacecraft. Their primary objective is to run high-performance computing in orbit and prove its practical use, processing data where it is generated rather than transmitting large volumes of raw data to ground stations. A satellite typically collects far more data than it can send down, and downlink time, rather than sensor capacity, is what limits how much of it reaches a user.

The first application is Earth observation. Each satellite carries a multispectral imager with a ground sampling distance of about 1 metre, while the OrbitLab platform supplies the onboard compute to process and analyse imagery directly in orbit. Workloads run on the spacecraft to extract what matters before downlink, demonstrating near-real-time analytics, intelligent image processing, data reduction, and selective downlinking. A user requesting flood extent, a ship count or a crop-stress map receives the answer rather than the raw frames.

The power system uses silicon solar cells rather than the gallium arsenide cells that are the industry standard for spacecraft. Silicon cells cost a fraction of GaAs cells, and the choice brings down the cost of each satellite, which could translate into lower pricing for customers running workloads on the platform. The mission will also demonstrate fine pointing and precision attitude control through an attitude determination and control architecture designed in India and built on domestically developed reaction wheels, star trackers, and fine sun sensors, including the StarSense star tracker the company introduced in June with support from IN-SPACe's Technology Adoption Fund.

The agreement follows a year in which TakeMe2Space closed a $5 million seed round led by Chiratae Ventures, lost its MOI-1 satellite in the PSLV-C62 launch failure in January 2026, and saw its PowerBank-50 battery earn flight heritage on Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 in July. The company's first mission, MOI-TD (Technology Demonstrator), was launched on December 30, 2024, and ran more than 20 experiments in low Earth orbit. MOI-1a is scheduled to launch on October 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission, with orbital injection expected by October 8 via a D-Orbit orbital transfer vehicle, and MOI-1b is also scheduled to launch in 2026.

TakeMe2Space has set out a path from a single spacecraft to a constellation delivering about 5 kW of orbital compute, with a longer-term target of a 50-kW orbital data centre. Waymaker 2 represents the critical step between those two stages. OrbitLab, combined with an Earth-observation payload, turns a satellite from a data-collection platform into a computing and data-processing platform in orbit, and the two spacecraft on this mission are the first built to that design at data-centre scale. The company also designs and manufactures two dozen satellite subsystems and test systems in-house, including the PowerBank-50 battery.