Ishan

6 Fireflies in Orbit, Solar Panels Deployed. There’s no better feeling.

Over the last week, we've been swarmed with absurd allegations of being secretly owned by a foreign player and somehow a threat to India's tech sovereignty. I wanna highlight an underrepresented aspect of this: this is not the first time we’ve seen insinuations that Pixxel isn’t Indian or that we have abstract foreign interests controlling us. I know the space community in India quite closely and know the familiar faces who’ve seen us build up to where we are. It’s also rather clear that it took only a couple specific accounts to stoke this narrative into existence over the last couple days, although they’ve been attempting it for months. Indian twitter has this tendency to turn snippets of poorly aggregated information into dramatised alarmist narratives, be it treating visiting diplomats as spying adversaries, assumptions of shady trade deals and sold-out civil institutions, or tales of ISRO sabotage without a published RCA. It’s weird. So to be clear about this: Pixxel is Indian, always has been. It wasn’t founded as a spinoff of some mysterious US based company that secretly owns us and handed us frontier hyperspectral tech. That’s our own entity, we developed the tech ourselves. It's quite flattering that people think it took a megacorp to pull it off, when it was only a couple dozen people. I write this post from our spacecraft facility in Bangalore where 300ish people proudly work on an increasingly sophisticated array of spacecraft to advance India’s spaceflight capabilities spanning defence, natsec, civil and commercial. Our customers know us well, and they trust us to deliver. Pixxel was spun out of BITS. Our first office was a makerspace under Ulsoor Metro station. If you look opposite to Third Wave Indranagar, you’ll see our CMR road office. If you look on Maps you’ll see our spacecraft integration facility in Kalyan Nagar, where the Firefly constellation was built. We have teammates from nearly every part of India here. We have Indians who had left the country to pursue educations and careers in aerospace who have returned to build in India. Indians who have spent their lives serving the country, at ISRO, DRDO, IAF, and other incredible institutions that shaped the India of today. Having the privilege of working with them to advance the frontier of spaceflight in this country, has instilled a greater sense of patriotism in me than Twitter LARPers ever have. If you check for the US locations you’ll find our offices there for our global sales teams, and we will expand further with Pixxel Federal. We also have teams working in nearly every major geospatial market across the world. We announced our NRO contract in March 2023 and an update in May 2026. We announced our NASA CSDA contract in September 2024. Several news publications covered it and it’s published on our website. This is all public and transparent, and it’s baffling to make it sound like a secretive conspiracy and then draw baseless assumptions over it. There's plenty of US aerospace companies that sell critical technologies to the Indian military, from advanced sensors and components, to entire integrated systems and aircraft. Surely the inverse of this, an Indian company selling aerospace technologies to the US market, is something to aspire for. I will say - having haters is tremendously fun. Never had that before, it’s inspiring. To everyone who has supported us for so long, thankyou. We will continue to double down on 🇮🇳/acc. We’re only getting started.

There are certain products that win on the physics trade alone. @Airbound_Aero is built around one of them. We currently use 100-2000kg Vehicles to transport <5kg Parcels through some of the densest cities on the planet. The fuel cost is spent moving the vehicle, which is 95%+ mass. The cargo barely counts. But instead if you wrap it in a mass-produced carbon fibre shell, attach motors and a modest battery, and give it just enough compute to know how to fly and where to go, it can reach close to a 1:1 Payload to Vehicle ratio. A drone glider that weighs nearly the same as its package. It can: - transport objects at minimal electricity cost - point A to point B as the crow flies - several times faster - completing more deliveries within the same time It’ll be cheaper on ₹/kg no matter what. Naman has been obsessed with this idea. There’s nothing else that is more enjoyable for him than thinking about how to fly mass cheaper. If there’s anyone who brings drone delivery to the world at scale, it’ll be him. Congrats on Series A!!

The dawn of a new era in Indian Spaceflight. A commercial launch vehicle designed and manufactured in Hyderabad, launching from the Indian coastline, and reaching orbit on its first attempt What an incredible achievement from @SkyrootA, and a clear signal that the deeptech capabilities of this country can achieve all that we dream of 🇮🇳🌌

What a country

One of the prettiest images of earth we’ve ever taken, shot from Firefly’s Hyperspectral VNIR Imager

RocketLab choosing companies to acquire

Bangerlore v5 This party has become a staple, an exceptional gathering of people who care deeply about the tech scene in blr. The chance to run into a dozen familiar faces and a hundred new ones - founders and hackers chasing down audacious goals in every segment imaginable. The breadth and quality of conversation you encounter here is unmatched. As always, a massive shoutout to the efforts of @neilshroff, @namanski_,@sva_haa, @_lagrangepoint, @usefaff and the crew that puts this all together. They’ve built something special.

Caught a Firefly cameo on the Starship v3 webcast!

Unrelated: Ganymede alone has 8.7x the liquid water of Earth's oceans