A satellite model is placed on a picture of Earth in this illustration taken
| Photo Credit:
Dado Ruvic
India’s defence authorities will use Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations for communication and meteorological services in the future, Lt Gen Anil Kumar Bhatt (retd), Director General of the India Space Association, told businessline.
“Today, we ues GEO-satellites for defense forces like the Army, Navy and Air Force. In future, LEO constellations will also be used for satellite communication, as well as meteorology, which is very important for the defense forces,” said Bhatt, adding that OneWeb and SpaceX constellations are the only LEO satellites coming to India currently. One of these services, OneWeb, was used by defense forces during the earthquake in Myanmar,” he said.
Further, Bhatt said that the over 250 start-ups in India, as estimated by Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), will drive the space sector. One such company is Suhora Technologies, whose 60 per cent of revenue (₹42 crore this financial year) comes from defense sectors, while the rest is from civilian and State government applications. The company offers solutions for defence authorities to monitor areas of interest and use data coming from optical satellites, radar satellites, radio frequency satellites and thermal satellites. Amit Kumar, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at Suhora Technologies, said the company was now looking to launch its own LEO satellites over the next 2-3 years as well as utilise more machine learning technology and LLM data from Indian sources.
“We use all that kind of data and combine it to one single platform. And then platform analyzes that data and creates insights for the users. So that’s our main offering for our defense customers,” said Kumar.
Earlier, Suhora won seed fubnding from InSpace for creating a maritime domain awareness platform that helps monitor India’s coastlines for securty and environmental reasons.
“The funding that we received from IN-SPACe is around ₹1 crore for now. That will help us in building a platform towards this angle. Going forward, we are hoping to get into another round within space to enhance it further so that it gets utilized more in more strategic areas,” said Kumar.
Published on May 26, 2025
