A new beginning for India's first aerospace start-up TeamIndus

Even if the goal remained unattainable for TeamIndus, evangelising space exploration is, in itself, a big achievement

A decade-old dream ended in January when Bengaluru’s TeamIndus, India’s first aerospace start-up, announced that Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) would not be ferrying TeamIndus’ lander to the moon. The launch agreement between the private aerospace company and the space agency had been terminated.
 
This meant India’s first private aerospace company was out of Google's Lunar XPRIZE contest. The Lunar XPRIZE contest offered $30 million to the first private entity (at least 90 per cent of funding had to be from private sources) to land a moon-rover, which travelled for 500 metres on the moon's surface, and transmitted video content.  The deadline was March 31, 2018. By January 2018, only five teams were in the running including TeamIndus.

 
But the competition itself was called off in that same week. The XPRIZE Foundation announced: “After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar XPRIZE teams, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt by the March 31st, 2018 deadline. This literal “moonshot” is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.”
 

That ended a saga that started in 2007 when the XPRIZE was announced. TeamIndus was among the teams that won subsidiary “Milestone” prizes worth at least $6 million. But even the first prize would never be enough to cover the costs of such a lunar mission.

 
A moon-trip on ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket would cost more or less the same as the first prize. Ballpark calculations suggest that the PSLV launch fee would have been between Rs 1.5-2 billion. That’s going by the fact that ISRO’s Chandrayaan-I mission cost about Rs 3.8 billion and about half of that was the launch cost.
 
Taking R&D, design fabrication, tests etc into account, TeamIndus had to raise at least Rs 4 billion.  Many corporate bigwigs such as Ratan Tata, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Nandan Nilekani and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala were among early investors in the venture. But it’s believed that TeamIndus raised only about half of the money it needed.

The task was to hire a team that could design and develop a 600-kg lander, and rover. The lander had to make a soft landing in order to avoid damaging its cargo. After landing, the rover would roll out of the lander. The rover would be a small vehicle, built to move around the surface and take videos.
 
A soft lunar landing is hard in itself because the thick layer of moon dust makes the surface hard to assess. Soft lunar landings have only been attempted by Nasa’s Apollo manned missions. Chandrayaan, for example, involved slamming a probe at high speed into the moon’s surface.

 
The R&D team involved many retired Isro personnel and it required using government facilities such as the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad, to test the lander and other equipment. While the design was done in-house, parts had to be fabricated from all over the world. TeamIndus was cooperating in those projects with the Japanese Team Hakuto, which was also a competitor in the Lunar XPRIZE. Hakuto's own rover was to be carried in the TeamIndus lander on the same ISRO flight, in a sub-contract.
 
The TeamIndus contract with Antrix, Isro’s commercial arm, was signed in December 2016. Confidentiality agreements prevent either party from speaking on record about why the agreement was aborted. However, insiders say that the funding fell short and by mid-December 2017, it was evident that the launch wasn't going to happen.

 
TeamIndus was supposed to pay Antrix in instalments, clearing the whole fee before the launch. It couldn't maintain the schedule of payments. There are also said to have been some tensions because TeamIndus “sub-tenanted” Hakuto rather than leaving Antrix to deal directly with the Japanese.
 
TeamIndus CEO Rahul Narayan has said, given a six-month extension, or maybe eight or nine months, the funding for hardware imports could have been raised. Indeed, he says that the mission will eventually happen, possibly with Hakuto tagging along. Apart from that, TeamIndus, or rather its parent, Axiom Research Labs, is designing equipment such as a HALE (High-Altitude Long Endurance) aircraft.

 
It will be wonderful if the lunar mission is resurrected. Even otherwise, the publicity and outreach surrounding the contest has inspired many youngsters. TeamIndus held a series of programmes that reached school children. Around the world, teams collectively raised over $300 million. Hundreds of high-end jobs were created and the first commercial aerospace companies established in India, Malaysia, Israel and Hungary. Evangelising space exploration so effectively is, in itself, a positive outcome, even if the ultimate goal remained unattainable.