TakeMe2Space's MOI-1A rides SpaceX to orbit — India's first orbital computing satellite is live

Comebacks don't get more literal than this. On October 1/2, 2026, SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission lifted 130 payloads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California — and aboard it was MOI-1A, Hyderabad startup TakeMe2Space's orbital computing satellite and India's first in the category.

The specs: a 14-kg satellite with 117 TOPS of NVIDIA compute, 2 TB of storage and a nine-band multispectral imager. The value prop is pure edge computing — customers upload containerised AI models, and data volume shrinks by roughly 1,000x (300 GB of SAR imagery becomes a few kilobytes of insights), processed in orbit instead of downlinked raw. 23 customers are already signed, around 80% of them outside India, spanning geospatial firms and Indian educational institutions using it as an orbital research lab — with use cases in agriculture, defence, supply chain, mining and insurance.

The backstory makes it a genuine comeback. TakeMe2Space's first attempt, MOI-1, was lost on ISRO's PSLV-C62 in January 2026 when the third stage failed. Founder and CEO Ronak Kumar Samantray's team booked the earliest SpaceX slot rather than waiting — and made it in nine months. The roadmap: MOI-1B on ISRO's SSLV in November, Gen-2 satellites (MOI-2/MOI-3) in 2027 with ~10x capacity and laser inter-satellite links at ~$1M annual revenue per satellite, a six-satellite constellation by 2028 targeting ~$6M ARR, and a 1,500-kg-class Gen-3 around 2029.

MOI-1A didn't fly alone. The same mission carried SatLeo Labs' TAPAS-1 (Ahmedabad — India's first commercial CubeSat thermal payload, on Dhruva Space's LEAP-2 platform) and Eon Space Labs' MIRA (a 502-gram multispectral imager integrated on MOI-1A). IN-SPACe chairperson Pawan Goenka called it a "big day for India's private space sector" — and he's right.