India’s TakeMe2Space plans to launch its MOI-1A orbital-computing satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission on Oct. 1. The under-50-kg craft is designed to run customer-uploaded AI models on data in orbit and send analysis to Earth instead of raw data.
TakeMe2Space describes MOI-1A as India’s first orbital-computing satellite. It carries Nvidia Orin NX edge-computing processors and has about 150 watts of power, CEO Ronak Samantray said. The company said it has signed 23 customers for the mission, including geographic-information-system firms and educational institutions; commercial users span agriculture, mining, supply-chain management and insurance. US-based space-data analytics firm Little Place Labs is among the customers.
Samantray said savings from avoiding raw-data downloads can offset the premium customers pay for in-orbit computing. A late-2024 demonstration validated application uploads, AI inference in orbit and result downloads; a later satellite, MOI-1, was lost after a launch-vehicle third-stage failure. The company plans larger satellites from 2027 to increase capacity and lower costs, and aims to offer orbital cold storage for critical data to financial-services and defense customers as an additional backup beyond terrestrial cloud providers.
