India's satellite builders no longer have to wait months and pay premium import prices for a critical power component — because one has now been built, launched, and proven in space right here at home. BJP MP Anurag Thakur on Friday, July 31, 2026, congratulated the team behind TakeMe2Space's Power-Bank 50, calling it a proud milestone for Atmanirbhar Bharat as India's first indigenously developed satellite battery achieved flight heritage in orbit. For years, the gap in India's space supply chain was quiet but costly. Satellite manufacturers sourcing power systems from abroad faced two compounding problems: high procurement costs and long lead times that could delay entire mission timelines. Power-Bank 50 directly addresses both. By demonstrating reliable performance in orbit, it has crossed the single most important threshold in space hardware — flight heritage, the proof that a component actually works in the environment it was built for.

TakeMe2Space and the Private Sector's New Role

TakeMe2Space is among the wave of Indian space startups that gained ground after 2020, when the government opened the sector to private participation through the IN-SPACe framework. That structural shift — running alongside ISRO rather than replacing it — was designed precisely to catalyse indigenous development of components that India had historically imported. Power-Bank 50 is one of the clearest early results of that bet paying off. Thakur's post captured the significance directly: 'Until now, Indian satellite builders had to depend largely on imports for this critical component, involving high costs and long waiting periods.' That sentence is not rhetorical — it describes a real structural constraint that every domestic satellite programme has had to plan around.

Atmanirbhar Bharat's Space Chapter

The Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, announced in May 2020, set self-reliance in critical technologies as a national priority across sectors. Space was always part of that ambition, but ambition needs proof points. A satellite battery with verified orbital performance is exactly that — a concrete, testable, exportable proof point that Indian engineering can deliver mission-critical hardware, not just assemble it. With Power-Bank 50 now carrying flight heritage, other Indian satellite programmes can qualify it as a domestic alternative. That compounding effect — one proven component unlocking procurement decisions across multiple future missions — is where the real long-term value lies. India's space ambitions are large and accelerating. The components that power them should be built here too. Power-Bank 50 just made that argument in the most convincing language possible: it worked.