In 2018, if all goes to plan, India will land two rovers on the moon — one courtesy ISRO and the other by an intrepid start-up of 20-somethings

In a large and quiet hall, at the centre of which an indoor tree stands, scores of young ‘Ninjas’ and ‘Skywalkers’ — 20-something engineers — are engrossed at work on their computers. The tree is like their silent sounding board, explains a Skywalker who prefers to be known as just J: they tag their doubts, queries, information and SOS requests on it.

Meet TeamIndus, a start-up that is quite literally aiming for the moon: if all goes to plan, they will, in early 2018, land a rover on the lunar surface.

But for a Google Maps alert, I would have missed the office, a bungalow partially hidden by fruit trees, somewhere on the way to Bengaluru International Airport. There is no name board or even a faint hint of the work that goes on inside the elegant building.

Infotech entrepreneur and ‘Fleet Commander’ of TeamIndus, Rahul Narayan, looks rushed. It has been an afternoon tightly packed with meetings. It all began some six years ago, when Narayan started casually tracking an incredible global contest: the multi-sponsor Google Lunar XPrize (GLXP), with a winner’s bounty of $20 million (roughly Rs. 135 crore) and a few other prizes worth at least $10 million. The winner would be the first moon rover that moves on lunar terrain for half a kilometre within a lunar day (14 Earth days) and sends back clear images of a specified resolution. All contestants are to take off before December 31, 2017.

“I created the company just to be in this competition,” says Narayan, looking somewhat still in disbelief. “We were the last to enter the contest.”

TeamIndus hopes to land the craft on the satellite at the crack of dawn of Republic Day in 2018. The spacecraft will be carrying the rover of its Japanese co-contestant, Hakuto, too.

TeamIndus is the only Indian entry in the race. “Like many children growing up in the 1980s, space has always fascinated me. You wonder if there is a role to play in the wider scheme of things. But everything related to space is so complex, time-consuming and expensive! It was surely not a career prospect,” says Narayan. Then in late 2010, as he began to follow the contest, he found that it was unique and interesting from a start-up and engineering perspective. “There were nearly 30 teams in the beginning and it was a big challenge. We had no idea how far we would go. Yet, we had winning on our mind”.

Ever since, the GLXP has irrevocably turned the career trajectories of the Delhi IIT alumnus and his four co-founder friends: former Indian Air Force fighter pilot Samir Joshi; investment banker Julius Amrit; advertising professional Dilip Chabria; and aerospace engineer Indranil Chakrobarthy. In 2015, Narayan moved TeamIndus from Delhi to Bengaluru to be close to the space ecosystem in the city. Their innovation centre, Axiom Research, is based here.

The GLXP is about finding innovative, low-cost means of space exploration. The contest is happening at a time when NewSpace (the word for private space enterprises) is seriously getting into all the areas government space agencies were in in the last 60 years in unconventional and disruptive ways.

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TeamIndus hopes to land the craft on the satellite at the crack of dawn of Republic Day in 2018. The spacecraft will be carrying the rover of its Japanese co-contestant, Hakuto, too.

That puts it ahead of another lander project conceived by the established, government-run space war horse, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). For a few years now, the national space agency has been intending to return to the moon after its 2008 lunar mission. While Chandrayaan-1 only orbited the satellite, Chandrayaan-2 includes a lander and a rover and is slated to be launched in early 2018.

After a hiatus of a few decades, governments and private ventures across the world are once again looking at the moon — India and China in the last decade and South Korea and Japan in the coming years. Around 10 missions slated for launch between 2017 and 2020 intend to land on the moon and many others in the next decade may even carry crews.

All space missions are challenging, but landing missions are particularly complicated. A successful landing is a hard dream, as the Soviets and the Americans found out over numerous failed trips in the 1950s and 60s. ISRO is grappling with its own landing challenges and trying to perfect the right descent through a series of simulated tests, says ISRO Satellite Centre’s Director M. Annadurai, who was nicknamed ‘Moon Man’ after he steered Chandrayaan-1 as its project director. Since the late 1950s, a handful of space-faring countries have sent up around 50 missions to the moon; some to go round the satellite, some to land and roam. Just half the early attempts were successes. And the U.S. is the only one so far to have landed astronauts on the moon starting with Apollo 11 in 1969.

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Space novice Indus knows full well that the prize money will cover only a third of the cost of their mission, which works out to about Rs. 430 crore. It means time, money, technology, hands, hard work and, above all, luck. When they registered for the GLXP, Narayan and friends paid a fee of $50,000 (Rs. 30 lakh, roughly). They raised it “with the help of friends, families, their friends and their families.” Scores of corporate czars hitched their wagon to this rising star either as investors or sponsors. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys fame was an early presence. Sasken Technologies’ chief and co-founder Rajiv Mody offered an older premises to start them off. Many senior corporate executives, star entrepreneurs and, more recently, the stock market beacons like Rakesh Jhunjhunwala also got into the game. Even as this story is being written, TeamIndus is sealing a second round of finance amounting to Rs. 60-70 crore ($ 10 million).

We get asked about the cost every time. We are a very big country. I don’t think one programme of $65-75 million will throw the country out of gear — Rahul Narayan, Fleet Commander of TeamIndus

A big global brand like the French space agency, Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), has associated itself with TeamIndus’ moon shot by placing micro cameras on the rover; Europe has not yet had a lander on the moon.

If there is pride in the fact that only four other teams in the world have confirmed their trips so far, there is now also the urgency to get the 600 kg spacecraft-cum-lander and a 25 kg rover up and ready.

“A whole bunch of engineering challenges” had to be overcome while building the lander spacecraft. After all, even ISRO faces restrictions when it needs to import certain components. “A lot of technology is controlled. It is not easy for an outsider. We did not copy-paste although previous mission stories are all online. Components can come from outside but a lot of work was done in-house, such as the flight computer, power control cards and algorithms,” says Narayan. The team will also manage post-launch command work on the lander.

Some solutions came in the form of professional guidance from none other than K. Kasturirangan, who had, several years ago, as ISRO chairman, conceived Chandrayaan-1. TeamIndus roped in ISRO’s former propulsion ace R.V. Perumal; P.S. Nair, who was part of the lunar spacecraft building team; and Chandrayaan-1’s mission director, N. Srinivasa Hegde, to form an experienced team of 20 retired ISRO scientists, besides an eager army of engineers. Last year, as an early reward for all the effort, the start-up won the GLXP’s milestone prize of $1 million for proving the lander concept.

In October, Narayan’s team booked a slot on ISRO’s upcoming Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) — the same PSLV rocket that catapulted Chandrayaan-1 to the moon in 2008.

The start-up formed in 2011 is now about 65 per cent of the way through and readying to start testing the final flight models. “We didn’t really think we would come this far; we just took up the hurdles one by one,” says Narayan, rather modestly.

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So what is it that goads serious players like ISRO to return to the moon and virtual space muggles to embark on such high-cost adventures?

“There is a lot about the moon that we don’t know,” says celebrated cosmologist and former ISRO Chairman U.R. Rao, reminding us that Chandrayaan-1 made history by finding lunar water. It is important to explore and understand the moon, which, like Mars, may hold answers to man’s and earth’s past, he says. Who knows, centuries later, our nearest celestial neighbour may also be our home and be a staging point for other interplanetary exploits. “It has a lot of resources; rare earths that India has lost out on; and helium-3 as an energy source. I calculate that a truckload of helium can do for one year’s energy for the world.”

Rao co-authored with Arthur C. Clarke, the late space missionary and science fiction writer, an unpublished paper nearly three years ago that speaks of colonising the moon and Mars. “If we can produce fuel on the moon, that would be fabulous. Like Clarke, I firmly believe that sooner or later we must develop habitats on the moon and Mars. Scientists have hundreds of burning questions such as, are we likely to colonise these places, maybe 500 years later? If so, how do we live there, in the rills, in the absence of an atmosphere? How do we protect astronauts from radiation?” Every mission gets us closer to answering some of these questions.

Dr. Rao says the lander must be loaded with sensors so that it descends intelligently on a flat spot, without hitting a boulder, bouncing or toppling. This is the exercise with which both ISRO and TeamIndus will soon get busy.

In late October, some members from Dr. Annadurai’s rolling team of 70 in ISRO started simulating a proto-lander over a dozen artificial craters they created in Chitradurga district. They have also brought over 50 tonnes of pulverised rock from a village near Salem and replicated a near-lunar surface in their testing facility in Bengaluru.

ISRO’s maiden lunar mission in 2008-09, the orbiter Chandrayaan-1, failed three months short of its first year but is internationally hailed for finding lunar water-ice or hydroxyl. Chandrayaan-2 will soft-land on the moon. A robotic rover will probe the terrain for 14 Earth days. The 3,250 kg spacecraft (around four times heavier than TeamIndus’ craft) will be launched by its powerful, indigenously-built Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mk-II rocket. Half a dozen scientific instruments or payloads are getting ready at various ISRO centres. These will scan the lunar terrain for surface information, minerals and for details of hydroxyl and water-ice.

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Ask Narayan if so much money should be spent on a dream that may not guarantee an outcome, and he says, “We get asked about the cost every time. We are a very big country. I don’t think one programme of $65-75 million will throw the country out of gear.”

And then there is the larger goal. “People come up to us and say you don’t have to do it. But it is time India did something like this, which is unique and up to global standards. Our mission is truly ‘har Indian ka moonshot’.”

madhumathi.d@thehindu.co.in