Before the wave, the ripples: Indian spacetech warms up to dealmaking

GalaxEye launched its first satellite in May, and the sun wasted little time testing it. In the final stretch of the spacecraft’s early orbit phase, a geomagnetic solar storm struck, and radiation from the event likely knocked out a critical onboard system, the Bengaluru company said in an update this July. Contact with Mission Drishti was gone. And this was no ordinary spacecraft to lose touch with: the world’s first OptoSAR satellite, fusing optical and radar imaging in one machine, and the largest privately developed Earth observation satellite India has built. Losing contact with your first satellite is painful for anyone in this business. For a young firm, it also raised an awkward question: how much of its own machine did it actually control?