Managing traffic in outer space

In his third year at Lovely Professional University in Punjab, Anirudh Sharma dropped out of college to focus on his passion – space tech and defence.

His father worked at DRDO, so Anirudh was always enthusiastic about defence. Between 2016-18, he did a lot of mountaineering in Himachal and Uttrakhand. “Night skies are very clear from the mountains and that ignited my fascination for space,” Anirudh says.

In 2020, he founded Digantara, with two school friends, Rahul Rawat and Tanveer Ahmed. Their idea was to build technology that scouts for space debris – an area called Space Situational Awareness (SSA).

The venture was soon granted a patent for an in-orbit LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) based system designed to track space debris. LiDAR is a remote sensing technology that uses laser light to measure distances and create 3D models of objects and environments.

This patent helped Anirudh incubate the venture at IISc in 2020. “They told us this space needs PhDs, scientists – not people like us. The patent helped convince them that we were serious and capable,” he recalls.

Three years ago, the venture, thanks to funding from Kalaari Capital, 360 One Asset, SBI Investment Japan and others, moved into a 25,000 sqft campus in Bengaluru. It now has around 150 people, 85% of them engineers, working in fields like astrodynamics – the study of objects moving in space and tracking objects in space to help satellites navigate without colliding.Tracking every object

There are more than 17,000 active satellites in Low Earth Orbit or LEO (in the 400 km to 2000 km band above Earth). “Our job is to track every object that could be a satellite or space debris, build a catalogue of these objects, and predict their paths,” Anirudh says. “It’s like air traffic management, for space.”

If a satellite is already up there or to be launched, Digantara can help it avoid collisions. “Even a few centimetre-sized objects can destroy a satellite worth millions of dollars.

There are three parts to Digantara’s technology – telescopes, satellites and an analytics engine. The first comprises a network of six ground-based telescopes – three in India, two in Chile in South America, and one in New Mexico in North America. Then they have three satellites – two to monitor space weather, including radiation in space, and the third, called Mission Scott launched in 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket, is a space-to-space tracking satellite.

The satellites carry sensors which track objects and relay the data including images, to the ground-based analytics centre. The data engine stitches together inputs from multiple sensors to determine an object’s position, velocity and trajectory. The analytics software then translates this data into actionable intelligence.
Each telescope also observes hundreds of objects against the dense backdrop of stars. Their algorithm identifies moving objects, matches them against existing catalogues, and predicts their paths. Digantara has built everything in-house – from electrooptical payloads and LiDAR systems to analytics software.Military demand explodes

Digantara’s primary offering is for the military, to track adversary satellites, monitor sensitive regions, and assess threats in real time. Sharma sees space becoming the fourth domain of warfare – after land, sea and air – and countries are investing in monitoring orbital activity. Its customers include Indian defence agencies and ISRO, United States Space Command, UK Space Agency, and defence bodies in Singapore and Thailand. Only a handful of companies globally offer end-to-end SSA capabilities.

Building the system hasn’t been easy. Supply chains for advanced optical systems were weak in India, forcing the team to develop capabilities from scratch. Hiring was another hurdle; deep-tech talent was scarce, and many recruits came from academic or govt backgrounds, requiring retraining for a commercial environment.
Yet, timing worked in their favour. The sharp fall in launch costs – driven largely by reusable rockets from companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX – democratised access to space. As satellite launches surged, so did the need for traffic management and surveillance.

“Many things that Musk and companies like Maxar Technologies (American space tech company) have done led me into thinking how to develop a commercial space company,” says Anirudh. For decades, govts were the drivers of space programs. From around 2015, commercial space ventures emerged and the launch of reusable rockets changed the dynamics of how space was perceived.

“As humanity increasingly explores life beyond Earth, someone has to build the navigation systems,” Anirudhsays.