The Moon Racers!

In the Biggest Private Space Race Ever, an Indian Start-up Vies With Four International Teams for a $20 Million Prize to Land a Rover on the Moon
 

- Raj Chengappa

Rahul Narayan sits perched on the edge of a simulated lunar landscape at the headquarters of TeamIndus on the outskirts of Bengaluru. Next to him is the prototype of the moon rover, a four-wheeled, all-aluminium robot that his team has built and which is in the process of undergoing final tests. If all goes well, the rover will be dropped on the moon’s surface by December 2017 and traverse 500 metres while sending back high-definition images and videos of earth’s closest celestial companion. If it succeeds, TeamIndus will create space history by becoming the first private enterprise in the world to not only build and land a spacecraft on the moon but have a rover ride the surface as well.

TeamIndus has named the rover ECA, an acronym for Ek Chhoti si Asha (a small hope). But the venture symbolises a giant leap forward in the quest for space exploration. Representing India, TeamIndus is one of the five teams across the world that have been shortlisted this January to compete in the greatest private space race ever—the Google Lunar X Prize. The other four teams that have qualified are Moon Express (US), SpaceIL (Israel), Hakuto (Japan) and Synergy Moon (an international consortium). The competition, sponsored by Google and kicked off in 2007, is designed to challenge engineers, entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration by privately funded teams.