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TAMPA, Fla. — The Maldives is looking to raise $50 million for a space agency fund that aims to be the first of its kind for an island nation, targeting sovereign infrastructure and support for other developing states facing climate and security challenges.
The Maldives Space Fund (MSF), based in the United Arab Emirates for regulatory oversight, was announced Oct. 1 during the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney.
Close to $5 million in pre-commitments has already been secured from investors including family offices in the Middle East, according to Rajeeshwaran Moorthy, a space venture capitalist advising the Maldives’ three-year-old space agency on the fund.
He said various space agencies aligned with the Maldives mission are also lining up to help MSF hit its funding target by 2027, in addition to private capital.
“We’re signaling to the world that the Maldives has aggressive ambitions for space,” Moorthy told SpaceNews.
The Maldives Space Research Organisation (MSRO), which employs fewer than 50 people, is already working on a ground station pilot and low Earth orbit satellites focused on marine conservation, illegal fishing detection and broader support for small island developing states (SIDS).
The $50 million fund represents an initial phase designed to support MSRO’s current priorities, while giving it the capacity to begin scaling through its first growth stage.
“There’s no point in just getting a ground station or satellites to solve individual problems,” Moorthy said.
“What you need is a structured approach. The overall ambition of the fund is not just to tackle individual priorities for a space agency, but to the wider SIDS community, so there is a shared and equitable return for all island-based agencies.”
Moorthy said the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), which has been supporting MSRO, has appointed him as an advisor as part of its partnership with the agency.
He is also an advisor for Axiom Space, the Texas-based commercial space station developer, and co-leads efforts at Australia’s Swinburne University Space Venture Fund as an investment advisor.
Strategic rationale
The Maldives hopes to leverage its equatorial position to attract ground station and space situational awareness (SSA) investments, while its location along Indian Ocean shipping lanes makes it a natural hub for space-based maritime monitoring.
Sovereign Earth observation capacity would also help the country track climate change, coral bleaching, coastal erosion and illegal fishing, generating data that could be shared with other SIDS.
Although based in the UAE, a steering committee that includes MSRO, UNOOSA and an independent fiduciary would decide how to deploy MSF’s capital.
MSF investments would be structured across three areas:
Infrastructure (30-40%): ground stations, SSA services, feasibility work for an equatorial launch site.
Applications and Analytics (30-40%): platforms for illegal fishing detection, climate monitoring, disaster response, scaled regionally through platform services.
Frontier Innovation (20-30%): research and development partnerships with universities and co-investments in global startups developing technologies relevant to SIDS.
Alongside the UAE, Moorthy said the Maldives recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Axiom and is nearing an agreement with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to help expand the space agency.
“The fund is the cradle, but everything else is also happening simultaneously … we’re going into the execution stage immediately,” he added.
Falling satellite and launch costs are lowering barriers for nations to establish increasingly important sovereign space capabilities.
In April, the Egypt-headquartered African Space Agency (AfSA) was created to coordinate programs across the continent, part of a wider push by emerging nations to expand their presence in the global space economy.
Countries such as the Dominican Republic are also considering commercial spaceports to gain a foothold in an increasingly strategic domain.
By positioning itself as a space development hub for island nations, the Maldives aims to set a precedent for how smaller states can use space to strengthen their domestic capabilities.
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