All eyes to the sky: Pvt startup pushes limits in space tech race

Through the looking glass, the satellite shines gold and silver. At its final testing stage it sits in what the industry calls a clean room, a massive warehouse the size of five badminton courts side to side, with a tall ceiling and a crane looming on top. Two technicians hover in white-overalls, adding in last minute work to its carbon fibre panels that open up like an elephant’s ears. A cylinder attached to one side is a seven-band multispectral imager while an antenna is its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor. The final payload on GalaxEye’s Mission Drishti is one of the lightest multi-sensor satellites in the world. GALAXEYE

This tiny, single box, called Mission Drishti, weighs 180kg and has been consuming the time, effort and creativity of 100+ employees of GalaxEye for the last three years. It’s also India’s first multi-sensor Earth observation satellite.

About 10-minute drive from the satellite facility, in the two-storied swanky new office of GalaxEye in Devanahalli Aerospace Park, Bengaluru, Kishan Thakkar, one of its five co-founders, is busy mapping the city’s roads. The aim is to find the smoothest route to take the satellite to UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Isro’s testing facility, which is about 40 kilometres away.

“Potholes are a genuine concern,” he laughs. Thakkar joined as VP-Engineering straight after completing his BTech from IIT-Madras and is responsible for assembling Mission Drishti and testing it. A satellite is sensitive to jerks and the container that houses it is designed for a smooth road or air transportation. No one predicted Bengaluru potholes. Like others in his team, Thakkar hasn’t slept for two months and doesn’t plan to till Mission Drishti is in orbit. Nervous energy is palpable in others at the GalaxEye’s office too. After all, their ambition is large.

The trick to observing from orbit

Technology for earth observation from space is quite established. The most popular way is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor that sends radar signals down to the surface which reflect, building a contour of black and white dots. It’s like an X-ray which only about 10,000 experts in the world can analyse. Others include optical, multispectral or hyperspectral imagery which takes photos in visible light to infrared. The latter fails about 70% of the times if the surface is clouded, hazy or it’s night.

So far, most of the satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) collect either of these data – not both. Satellite companies that offer merged SAR and optical data, merge it at a software level. US-based Maxar’s WorldView-3, for example, which leads globally in earth observation, combines its detailed optical imagery (panchromatic, multispectral and atmospheric) with SAR data that it obtains from partner satellite companies.

GalaxEye wants to merge optical and SAR data in one satellite, add in a layer of AI, and offer clear readable earth observation data available to any client from military to shipping. “It’s creating reliable data like GPS and offering a platform so anyone can build applications on top of it,” says Sushant Singh, co-founder and CEO, GalaxEye, acknowledging that not many have tried it across the world.

Singh’s epiphany came back in 2019 when he took a trial in a Waymo in California. Unlike autonomous cars which combine radar and visual data seamlessly at a mechanical stage to navigate, satellites still collect this data separately, merging vastly different images through software.

Singh realised that he could get better quality data if, like autonomous cars, the data was collected and merged at source. It was an industry gap on which he could build a startup. He moved back to Chennai, brought together his batchmates from IIT-Madras, the youngest being Thakkar, and set up GalaxEye in a small 150-square feet room near the campus. This was 2021.

Merging multi-sensor optical and SAR together, called an Opto-SAR payload, was easier said than done. Both SARS and optical sensors took images at very different angles from a satellite. Once aligned, time synchronising these two was also tricky.

The third alignment was synchronising on a software level. Over the last four years, the team built everything from scratch – from designing and manufacturing the Opto-SAR payload, to developing sensors and electronics and the software required to run data analytics. GalaxEye has built an AI platform called SyncFusion that reconstructs and offers an optical image of the earth surface even on cloudy days. It was recently patented in the US and India.

Like the potholes, their development journey had India-unique challenges. In 2022, they couldn’t test the first version of their indigenously build SAR prototype thanks to a blanket ban on radar testing unless it’s for defence purpose. To comply, Thakkar and GalaxEye CTO, Denil Chawda, reduced the size of the radar and came up with a smaller one to fly in the nose of an aircraft. This time, they faced the wrath of aircraft authorities which have a policy that you can’t test a radar for R&D purposes (personal research is okay). Finally they reduced the size of their SAR to 4kg to get permission to test it out on a drone. This testing was successful.

It’s this reason that the final payload on Mission Drishti is one of the lightest multi-sensor satellites in the world. To compare, at 180kg it is 6% weight of Maxar’s WorldView-3, which is at 2800kg. That’s rigorous systems engineering with some bit of the infamous Indian ‘jugaad’ to skirt policies and also save money.

WorldView-3 cost about $650 million to develop, launch and build ground infrastructure. So far, GalaxEye has raised a total of around $14 million that includes Pre-seed, Seed and Series A funding.

With this money, they built the satellite, increased the staff to 100+ and moved from the Chennai office to a 50,000 square feet facility in Bengaluru where they currently sit.

They chose Bengaluru, in spite of the potholes, because of access to funders and the robust space-tech ecosystem thanks to Isro’s multiple testing facilities like URSE. Then there’s manufacturing in Peenya, adds Thakkar, where you can get all kinds of components 3D printed. “There are vibration centres, climatic chambers and even radar manufacturing,” says Thakkar.

With geopolitical tensions across the continents, sovereign technology has become all the more essential to develop for nations. It’s this reason that the Indian government is actively encouraging the space startup ecosystem. It has announced a ₹1,200 crore investment, brought out the Indian Space Policy 2023 and started the Innovation for Defence Excellence (IDEX) program which gives clarity to startups like GalaxEye on sovereign needs of Indian defence. Indian academia has set up robust incubation cells and research parks which host new ideas, says Singh.

To ride this wave, Galaxeye has ramped up its business development and sales team. Once their satellite is up and running, sometime around May or June this year, GalaxEye will start selling easily readable earth observation data and data analytics to clients in defence, maritime, insurance and natural disaster.

The startup has also built a fabrication facility to create in-house sensors and a clean room warehouse where they can assemble new satellites – for themselves and for other businesses.

Once revenue streams solidify, they plan to raise Series B and launch 20-25 more satellites in space by 2035.

“We will have 10% of participation in sovereign space of India by 2035, something that no other private player has,” says Singh, adding that the total number of Indian satellites expected to be launched is around 200-220 in the next 10 years.

Their Indian competition for earth observation includes Pixxel which only does infrared imagery and Isro which offers SAR, optical, and multispectral imagery but through different satellites and softwares.

After the test at URSC, the satellite will be flown to Vandenberg in California, US from where it’ll fly 500km up on a SpaceX rocket, settling into LEO. If the satellite fails, their next slot will be 18-24 months away and all their planning and money will be kaput.

Unlike e-commerce startups, pivoting is not something that a space tech startup can do, reflects Singh. You develop, you persist, you hope that nothing goes wrong. And if all this works out, you wait for the market to mature.

(Shweta Taneja tracks the evolving relationship between science, technology and modern society. She also works as a philanthropy researcher and advisor.)