Team Indus is in a global space race for Moon, man and machine

Team Indus

Derek Webber, Google Lunar XPrize judge, and David Locke, manager of the prize,
examining the engineering model of Team Indus' lander in Bengaluru earlier this week.

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Moon, man and machine

An Indian team of young professionals Team Indus is in a global space race, flagged off by Google, to land a rover on the lunar surface, before end-2015, says Varuna Verma 



Narayan's geek group is the only Indian team competing in a moon marathon flagged off by IT giant Google in 2007. The Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) competition has 18 privately funded teams racing to build and land a spacecraft (lander in space-speak) on the moon.

Once on the moon, the spacecraft will eject a rover, which has to move 500 metres — no mean feat, given the moon's low gravity and sticky, superfine-sand surface — and beam back high-definition images and videos. The deadline is December 31, 2015. The first successful mission wins a $20 million jackpot.


For Team Indus, the going has been good so far, says founding member Dilip Chabria. "We're ready with a fully functional prototype of the rover and we're integrating the lander," he says. The project got a thumbs-up from former Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief K. Kasturirangan after a tech review last month, Chabria adds.


With its two main machines in order, the team is now in talks with Isro officials about permitting its spacecraft to hitch a ride on the PSLV (polar satellite launch vehicle) up to the Low Earth Orbit — the cruising altitude for satellites.


The team has had some hurrah moments — celebrated with tea and samosas — on the way. It's won two Milestone prizes — cash awards of $2 million each — given by Google to teams moving on the right track and timeline. It was much needed money for the Indian start-up, which estimates its moon mission will cost about $45 million.


With two trophies under its belt, Indus has jumped into the top three rank, along with the US-based teams Astrobiotics and Moon Express.

Team Indus has, clearly, emerged as the dark horse of the race. Narayan, who says his only exposure to space was the Star Trek TV series, Julius Amrit and Indranil Chakraborty were buddies at the  Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where they studied computer science. Chabria is a marketing man and Sameer Joshi a former Indian Air Force pilot.

India's Team Indus goes for the moon shot - The Times of India
"Even if Team Indus launches later than the deadline of Google Lunar XPrize, India will salute you," N Vedachalam, a retired senior official of ISRO told Rahul Narayan and the others at Team Indus recently .

It's a line that nobody in the young team that Narayan leads can forget. And it's accolades like these that are keeping the team going, and which have considerably strengthened their determination to beat the Google Lunar XPrize deadline.

Narayan, an IIT-Delhi alumnus and a space enthusiast who had done several tech ventures, conceptualized the Moon mission in 2011 when he heard about the Google Lunar XPrize, a global competition to land a robotic space craft on the Moon by December 2015.