An Orbit Of One's Own
GQ India|July 2017

Rahul Narayan’s TeamIndus might put India on the moon – and give ‘amateur’ a good name in the process.

Nidhi Gupta
An Orbit Of One's Own
In 1980, when Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage first aired, Rahul Narayan was at that just-right impressionable age to be influenced by the American astronomer in a suit who sat in a VFX spaceship and talked about “atoms as massive as suns and universes smaller than atoms.” The Space Race, Star Wars, Star Trek all came and went; but, because “there’s no actual training for this sort of thing” in India, says Narayan, “I did the next best thing – I became an IT engineer.”

In 2011, Narayan, then the chief of yet another start-up in Delhi, did something that lies somewhere between impetuous and whimsical: At the last possible minute, he sent in an application for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE. The global competition invited private bids to build and soft-land a rover on the moon and send back photos and videos. The application cost $50,000, or his and a few friends’ life-savings.

This story is from the July 2017 edition of GQ India.

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This story is from the July 2017 edition of GQ India.

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