Mission Space flies fourth ZOHAR payload on HEX20's Maya-V1 as space weather market hits $1.4B

This article was published on May 4, 2026 Mission Space to Fly Its Next Space-Weather Payload on HEX20’s MAYA-V1 Mission There are more than 8,000 active satellites in orbit. By 2030, there will be more than 25,000. A single geomagnetic storm, the kind the sun produces several hundred times during a solar maximum, could cost the satellite industry $40 billion. In February 2022, a moderate storm knocked 40 freshly launched Starlink satellites out of orbit, costing SpaceX $50 million in hardware that had been in space for less than a day. A more recent storm in 2025 triggered nearly 5,000 simultaneous satellite manoeuvres. The companies operating those satellites need forecasts. The government agencies that have historically provided space weather data, NOAA, ESA, and their equivalents, were not built for a commercial satellite economy of this scale. Mission Space, a 15-person startup with offices in Miami, Israel, Luxembourg, and New York, is trying to fill the gap. Mission Space announced on Monday that it will fly its fourth space weather payload on HEX20’s Maya-V1 mission, a rideshare satellite built by the Indian SmallSat company HEX20, which is based at Technopark in Kerala. HE