Through the looking glass, the satellite flashes gold and silver. In its final testing stage it sits in what the industry calls a clean room, a huge warehouse the size of five badminton courts side by side, with a high ceiling and a crane at the top. Two technicians hover around in white attire, doing last-minute work on its carbon fiber panels that open like elephant ears. One side of the cylinder is a seven-band multispectral imager while one antenna is its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor.
This small, single box, called Mission Drishti, weighs 180 kilograms and has been consuming the time, effort and creativity of more than 100 GalaxyEyes employees for the past three years. It is also India’s first multi-sensor Earth observation satellite.
At GalaxyEye’s new two-storey office in Bengaluru’s Devanahalli Aerospace Park, about a 10-minute drive from the satellite facility, Kishan Thakkar, one of its five co-founders, is busy mapping the city’s streets. The aim is to find the easiest route to take the satellite to ISRO’s test facility UR Rao Satellite Center (URSC), which is about 40 kilometers away.
“Potholes are a real concern,” he says with a laugh. After completing his B.Tech from IIT-Madras, Thakkar joined straight away as VP-Engineering and is responsible for assembling and testing Mission Drishti. A satellite is sensitive to shocks and the container in which it is housed is designed for smooth road or air transport. No one had predicted the potholes in Bengaluru. Like others on his team, Thakkar has not slept for two months and has no plans until Mission Drishti reaches orbit. The nervous energy is palpable among others in the Galaxy office, too. After all his ambition is big.
classroom observation device
The technology of Earth observation from space is quite established. The most popular method is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor that sends radar signals to a surface which is reflected, creating an outline of black and white dots. It is like an X-ray which can only be analyzed by about 10,000 experts in the world. Others include optical, multispectral or hyperspectral imagery that captures images from visible light to infrared. The latter fails about 70% of the time if the surface is cloudy, hazy, or at night.
So far, most satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) collect one of these data – not both. Satellite companies that offer merged SAR and optical data merge it at the software level. For example, US-based Maxar’s WorldView-3, a global leader in Earth observations, combines its detailed optical imagery (panchromatic, multispectral and atmospheric) with SAR data it receives from partner satellite companies.
GalaxyEye wants to merge optical and SAR data into one satellite, add a layer of AI, and make clearly readable Earth observation data available to any customer 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 of GalaxyEye, acknowledging that not many people around the world have tried it.
Singh got relief in 2019 when he took a trial at Waymo in California. Unlike autonomous cars, which seamlessly combine radar and visual data in the mechanical stage to navigate, satellites still collect this data separately, merging very different images through software.
Singh realized that they could get better quality data if the data was collected and merged at the source, like with autonomous cars. This was an industry gap on which he could build a startup. He moved back to Chennai, brought along his batchmates from IIT-Madras, the youngest of whom was Thakkar, and founded GalaxyEye in a small 150-square-foot room near the campus. This was 2021.
technology creation
Combining multi-sensor optical and SAR, called an opto-SAR payload, was easier said than done. Both SARS and the optical sensor took images from a satellite at very different angles. Once aligned, these two were also difficult to synchronize at times.
The third alignment was synchronizing at the software level. Over the past four years, the team built everything from scratch – from designing and manufacturing the opto-SAR payload, to developing the sensors and electronics, and the software needed to run data analytics. GalaxyEye has created an AI platform called SyncFusion that reconstructs and provides an optical image of the Earth’s surface, even on cloudy days. It was recently patented in the US and India.
Like potholes, there were India-specific challenges in their growth journey. In 2022, they could not test the first version of their indigenously built SAR prototype due to a complete ban on radar testing unless it is for defense purpose. To comply with this, Thakkar and Galaxy CTO, Danil Chavda reduced the size of the radar and came up with a smaller radar to fly in the nose of an aircraft. This time, he faced the wrath of aircraft authorities, who have a policy that you cannot test radar for R&D purposes (individual research is fine). They eventually reduced the size of their SAR to 4 kg to gain permission to test it on drones. This test was successful.
That is why the final payload on Mission Drishti is one of the lightest multi-sensor satellites in the world. For comparison, at 180 kg it is 6% the weight of Maxar’s WorldView-3, which is 2800 kg. It is rigorous systems engineering combined with the notorious Indian ‘jugaad’ to avoid policies and save money.
WorldView-3 cost approximately $650 million to develop, launch, and build the ground infrastructure. To date, GalaxyEye has raised a total of approximately $14 million, which includes pre-seed, seed, and Series A funding.
Future
With this money, they built the satellite, increased the employee count to over 100 and moved from the Chennai office to a 50,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru where they currently sit.
Despite the potholes, they chose Bengaluru because of its access to funders and the strong space-tech ecosystem thanks to ISRO’s many test facilities like URES. Then there’s manufacturing at Peenya, where you can get all kinds of components 3D printed, says Thakkar. “There are vibration stations, climate chambers and even radar structures,” says Thakkar.
With geopolitical tensions rising across continents, the development of sovereign technology has become even more essential for nations. This is why the Indian government is actively encouraging the space startup ecosystem. It has made an announcement ₹An investment of Rs 1,200 crore, brought out the Indian Space Policy 2023 and launched the Innovation for Defense Excellence (IDEX) program which gives clarity to startups like GalaxyEye on the sovereign needs of Indian defence. Indian academia has set up robust incubation cells and research parks that host new ideas, says Singh.
To ride this wave, GalaxyEye has expanded its business development and sales team. Once their satellite is up and running, around May or June this year, GalaxyEye will begin selling easily readable Earth observation data and data analytics to customers in defense, maritime, insurance, and natural disaster.
The startup has also built a manufacturing facility to make in-house sensors and a clean room warehouse where they can assemble new satellites – for themselves and other businesses.
Once the revenue stream becomes stronger, they plan to raise Series B and launch 20-25 more satellites into space by 2035.
“By 2035, we will have 10% participation in India’s sovereign space, which no other private player has,” says Singh, adding that the total number of Indian satellites to be launched in the next 10 years is around 200-220.
Their Indian competition for Earth observations includes Pixel which does only infrared imagery and ISRO which provides SAR, optical and multispectral imagery but through different satellites and software.
After testing at URSC, the satellite will be transported to Vandenberg in California, USA, from where it will fly 500 km up on a SpaceX rocket and enter LEO. If the satellite fails, their next location will be 18-24 months away and all their planning and money will be ruined.
Singh believes that unlike an e-commerce startup, pivoting is not something a space tech startup can do. You grow, you persist, you hope nothing goes wrong. And if all this works, 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 consultant.)
