Antrix terminates launch services agreement with space startup TeamIndus

The Bengaluru-startup could not even muster half of the Rs 4.5 billion it required for the mission to the moon

Team Indus, the aerospace start-up says it still plans to pursue multiple missions to the moon (over the next three to five years) on its own and for clients.

That is after it opted out of a $30-million global competition to land a rover on the moon. The Bengaluru-based entity failed to mobilise the Rs 2.25 billion to hire a rocket from India’s space agency to hurl a spacecraft and land a rover on the moon’s surface by this March. The XPrize Foundation shut the competition after five finalists, including Team Indus, said they could not achieve the feat by then. Google was the prize sponsor.

“The original motive was if we could we land a rover that moves 500 metres and so on and so forth but, going forward, we’re seeing this as an engineering statement. We will try and maximise what we will land on the moon, the slightly altered problem statement our engineering team is working on,” said Rahul Narayan, founder of Axiom Research Labs, popularly known as Team Indus. 

“Once we do land on the moon, how can we go back and repeat it? Repeatability is something your customers would want to look at before they sign you up to do things in the longer term,” he added. Team Indus, he claims, had achieved 85 per cent of the work in terms of design, analysis and prototyping.

On Wednesday, Antrix, a commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said it had mutually agreed with Team Indus to terminate the launch services contract for the Google Lunar XPrize (GLXP). The launch was to be on a dedicated Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), Isro’s workhorse rocket that had hurled the Chandrayaan-1 mission into space.

On the Antrix statement, Narayan said, “We’ve been working very closely with them and what I can say is that we’ve parted ways amicably and we continue to look towards them for support and we will work with them in the future.”

So far, Team Indus, backed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, former Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata, Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, and Biocon chairman Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, has raised $25 million from investors. It had planned to raise more through debt or crowdsourcing for the aborted mission. 

Now, Narayan says, it is finalising a Series-B equity fundraising of $30 mn from investors. This would help it look at expanding the work it has done for commercial customers, here and abroad.

“In the near term, we’re looking to fly this (existing spacecraft) or an altered version of this. If we have a Maruti today, we’re not looking to fly a Mercedes anytime soon -- we’ll do that in three to five years. But, we will fly a slightly altered version of our spacecraft because it is qualified, we understand it inside-out and we have all the engineering in place,” he said.