A ‘Google Maps’ for Low-Earth Orbit?: Wknd interviews the founders of space-tech start-up Digantara
Their first tracker is now in orbit. A series of these will eventuallly generate live maps of satellites,fragments from old vessels, and debris as small as 5 cm
They spent their childhoods gazing up at the sky. Now they have a satellite out there, doing some of that for them.
Anirudh Sharma grew up in Bengaluru, the son of a DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) technical officer, captivated by the air shows his father took him to.
Tanveer Ahmed, also in Bengaluru (they were classmates, in fact), told anyone who asked that he was going to be a fighter pilot when he grew up.
Hundreds of kilometres away, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Rahul Rawat marvelled at the star-studded skies over Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand.
All this was just a few years ago. The three men are only 26. But their space-tech start-up Digantara (Sanskrit for Distant Land), recently launched the world’s first commercial space-based space surveillance satellite, named Space Camera for Object Tracking, or SCOT.
The 25-kg contraption (slightly larger than a shoebox) will essentially scan the skies and map debris as small as 5 cm in Low-Earth Orbit, providing maps and data, for a fee, to clients from among the growing number of government agencies and private companies operating satellites, labs, research vessels and potentially tourist operations off-planet.
Their SCOT left Earth aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-12 in January. It is currently in orbit, and relayed its first images on March 8.
Digantara shot into the limelight with an exuberant post that day. “Space just ran out of hiding spots,” the company tweeted.
Behind the scenes, it had been a long, nail-biting journey. In the tense hours following the launch, each orbital pass saw stress levels balloon, until they received the ping that told them the satellite was alive and well.
“I don’t really think I slept for a good 48 hours before we got our first signal,” says chief technical officer Ahmed, laughing.
“Receiving the images was a huge culmination of all our hard work,” adds chief executive officer Sharma. “This is a giant leap.”
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Think of it like air-traffic control, for space.
So far, most situational assessments off-planet have been carried out using ground-based systems. The Indian Space Research Organisation, for instance, uses NETRA (the Network for Space Object Tracking and Analysis) to keep an eye on objects that might be approaching Indian space assets, with a view to keeping those assets safe.
Most satellites and orbiters, including the International Space Station, are in fact designed for a certain amount of redundancy, with the understanding that parts will be struck occasionally, and need backups or repairs.
With rockets now being reused and traffic set to grow, the men behind Digantara decided to use their skills in computer science and aerospace engineering to meet a niche need no one else was yet meeting.
Digantara essentially aims to create “a Google Maps for Near-Earth Objects”, by tracking all activity down to tiny objects and fragments.
Space-based surveillance offers greater precision, and protection, in an environment where speeds exceed 14 km per second, says Sharma, who graduated in computer engineering from Lovely Professional University (LPU) in Punjab.
How much debris are we talking about?
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), over 39,000 space objects are now tracked by surveillance networks, of which 11,000 are active payloads. An estimated 40,500 pieces of debris are larger than 10 cm. Objects larger than 1 cm number over a million.
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Incidentally, the three men know what it’s like to lose something to a direct hit.
In 2018, a piece of space debris crashed into a satellite they helped build. “We had supplied components for it,” says Ahmed, who graduated in aerospace engineering from RV college, Bengaluru. “Its loss highlighted the need for space situational awareness.”
They were 19 and still in college when they joined hands to land that international consultancy project. They were still 19 when they registered Digantara as a company, to “claim an invoice that would eventually become our seed capital,” Sharma says.
Things picked up pace two years later, in 2020, when the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, offered to incubate their start-up. The trio’s first office was a room on the terrace of Sharma’s family home. All they had were four plastic chairs, a coffee table, a whiteboard, “and a strong vision,” he says, laughing.
The company has since grown to encompass 100 employees and an assembly and testing facility, all of which sit in a 25,000-sq-ft head office in Bengaluru. They recently expanded to Colorado, where they plan to set up a space-optics production facility to serve clients in the US.
The company is in the process of putting together funding, including from investors in the US, to expand the number of SCOTs. “We have one today and aim to build 15 more in the next two years, so we can gather more real-time data,” Sharma says.
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This wasn’t the original dream, though, for any of them.
Sharma’s family wanted him to take his computer engineering degree to the US and build a life there. He finally made it there, a couple of years ago, for a presentation at Stanford University.
“Like every Indian parent, my father didn’t hesitate to remind me that I could have been at Stanford already had I sat for the GRE,” he says, laughing.
Graduating in computer science engineering from LPU brought Rawat’s parents great joy. But then came his entrepreneurship, which felt to them like an internship that wouldn’t end.
Ahmed, meanwhile, was so heartbroken at not making it through the entrance exam for the National Defence Academy (NDA) that he chose aerospace engineering — which only made his parents more nervous. “I had to promise I wouldn’t try to go into space,” he says. “They are happy to know that this profession isn’t life-threatening in any way, and they’ve even got used to pronouncing the word “entrepreneur”.” (Which, we have to say, is no fun for anyone to say.)
Jokes aside, it is a huge relief, the co-founders say, to have met their goal of being first in the air, “at a time when space tech is in rapid development around the world,” as Sharma puts it.
They have seen their company raise $14.5 million in funding, over five years.
“Our mantra has been to celebrate failure and fail fast,” Sharma says. “We’ve made mistakes, learned along the way, built the right technology at the right time. I’d say that’s the lesson: Fail early and learn fast.”
