Moonstruck

Bangalore-based start up, Team Indus pursues its dream of landing on the moon despite dropping out of the race for the Google Lunar Xprize

- Shobha Tsering Bhalla & Nithya Subramanian

Bangalore-based start up Team Indus had a dream – of being the first private enterprise to land on the moon. But much before its countdown, the team led by Rahul Narayan hit a snag when it decided to part ways with Antrix, an arm of ISRO, which was working closely with it on this mission. Team Indus decided to pull out of the race though it maintains that it will continue its endeavour “to become the world’s first private space exploration mission and (is) exploring alternate launch providers for the same.”

But even the Google X-Prize Foundation, which funded the competition, has acknowledged the impossibility of any of the five remaining teams being able to design and land a spacecraft on the moon by the deadline of 31 March 2018, just three months away.

On January 23rd, the Foundation announced , “After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar XPRIZE teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline… The grand prize of the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.”

The journey started in 2011 with the vision by its founding team led by Rahul Narayan to put India on the global map for deep technology . It raised US$35 million from investors and in January 2015the team was awarded US$1million for having successfully completed a test of their landing system. It was one of the five teams, out of the 18 remaining entrants (out of the intial 30plus teams) to be rewarded for clearing a specified test.

In an exclusive interview with India Se Media on the sidelines of the India-Singapore/ASEAN Entrepreneurship Bridge (InSpreneur), much before these two decisions were made public, Rahul Narayan, Team Indus Lead, spoke at length about his dreams of landing on the moon and how he planned to achieve it.