Science

Three Indian Startups Just Put Satellites in Orbit on a SpaceX Rocket. What Are They Testing?

Oct 2, 2026 · 3 min read · Sourced and fact-checked
The short answer: On October 2, 2026, three Indian companies had payloads deployed from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare flight called Transporter-18. One senses heat from space, one runs AI on the satellite itself, and one hosts other companies' experiments.

Indian private space companies had a big day on October 2, 2026. Their satellites and payloads rode into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as part of a shared flight called Transporter-18.

What is a rideshare mission?

A rideshare launch carries many small satellites from different customers on one rocket, which splits the cost. According to The Hindu, the Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and Transporter-18 delivered 130 payloads to orbit. India Today gives the liftoff time as 11:48 pm IST on October 1. Dhruva Space said its satellite was deployed at 1 am IST on October 2.

India's space regulator IN-SPACe authorised the Indian payloads. Its chairperson, Pawan Kumar Goenka, called it a "big day for India's private space sector".

The three Indian missions

SatLeo Labs, TAPAS-1. The Ahmedabad company's payload is described as India's first dedicated commercial CubeSat-class thermal payload. It uses thermal infrared sensing to capture temperature information that ordinary cameras cannot see. IN-SPACe's chairperson listed uses such as crop stress, forest fires and urban heat.

TakeMe2Space, MOI-1A. This 14 kg satellite lets customers run AI models on Earth-observation images directly in orbit. TakeMe2Space says it carries 117 trillion operations per second of computing, 2 TB of storage and a nine-band multispectral imager. The idea is to process pictures on the satellite and send down only the result, instead of downloading large raw files. Uses named by the company include agricultural monitoring, mining and supply-chain intelligence.

Dhruva Space, LEAP-2. This is a platform that hosts several in-orbit demonstration payloads, including a star tracker from France's Sodern ArianeGroup and SatLeo's TAPAS-1. Dhruva Space also handled the launch integration with the Falcon 9 itself, building on its LEAP-1 mission, where it became the first private Indian company to do that in-house.

Why it matters

Satellites do not need to send everything home if they can think in orbit, and thermal sensors add a data type that regular cameras miss. These are demonstration missions, so the first goal is to prove the technology works in space. Real services come after.

Sources

Facts checked: October 2, 2026.

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