Multiple payloads developed by Indian companies were successfully deployed in orbit by Space X’s Falcon 9 in the early hours of October 2 from the Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, U.S.A., as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
This is the range and ambition of India’s private space ecosystem today. “Genuinely big day for India’s private space sector. Thermal sensing picks up what ordinary optical cameras cannot, from crop stress to forest fires to urban heat. A new layer of Earth intelligence, now opened up by Indian industry. Orbital computing, thermal intelligence, and a homegrown hosting platform, all on a single flight. Congratulations to all three teams. Wishing you a clean deployment and a long innings in orbit,” Goenka posted on X.
Dhruva Space’s Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Payloads (LEAP-2), hosting multiple In-Orbit Demonstration (IOD) missions, which includes a star tracker by France-based Sodern ArianeGroup, and TAPAS-1 by India-based Satleo Labs, were part of the Transporter-18 mission. Dhruva Space stated that LEAP-2 was successfully deployed in orbit at 1 a.m. IST on October 2. It has undertaken the end-to-end launch integration of the LEAP-2 satellite with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle, building on its experience with LEAP-1 , where Dhruva Space became the first private Indian company to undertake the launch vehicle integration of its satellite in-house. Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (INSPACe) Chairperson Pawan Kumar Goenka said that the deployment of the payloads as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission is a big day for India’s private space sector. SpaceX’s Transporter 18 is carrying two Indian satellites and an Indian hosted payload into orbit, all authorised by IN-SPACe. Among them, @satleolabs TAPAS-1, India’s first commercial thermal imaging payload built by a private company. Alongside it, @tm2space‘s MOI-1A brings AI computing to orbit, running models on the satellite itself, and @DhruvaSpace ‘s LEAP-2 flies four payloads, demonstrating its platform for hosting others in space.
“This extends Dhruva Space’s role beyond satellite manufacturing into launch integration and end-to-end mission delivery, reinforcing its full-stack space engineering approach. LEAP-2 will be supported by Dhruva Space’s growing global ground infrastructure, including its owned and operated ground station in Luleå, Sweden; the first NGE-owned and operated ground station outside India, authorised by the Government of India to provide Ground-Station-as-a-Service,” the company stated.
