MOI-1A: an Indian satellite weighing less than 50 kg will run its customers' models in orbit

The start-up TakeMe2Space embeds Nvidia Orin NX chips to process images directly in space and send back only the results. Launch scheduled for October 1.

Hyderabad-based start-up TakeMe2Space is scheduled to launch MOI-1A on October 1, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 carpooling flight. The spacecraft weighs less than 50 kilograms and is equipped with Nvidia Orin NX processors, designed for on-board computing. The company presents it as India's first orbital computing satellite, in the sense that it analyzes the data on board and only reports results, not raw files.

The business model is that of capacity leasing: customers load their own models onto the satellite, and when it flies over the area of interest, the processing is done in flight and only the output is transmitted to the ground. Twenty-three customers have reserved space on this mission — cartography, agriculture, mining, supply chains, insurance, and educational institutions.

MOI-1A replaces MOI-1, which was lost on January 12 when the third stage of an ISRO PSLV-C62 rocket failed. An earlier demonstrator, MOI-TD, was launched from Sriharikota on December 30, 2024; the company says it has conducted more than twenty tests in orbit there, including AI processing sent from the ground.