A Shot At The Moon

Rahul Narayan’s TeamIndus is in the fray to launch India’s first private moonshot. Besides the $20 million-prize money from Google, success could mean heralding a new age of space entrepreneurship in India.

- HaricHandan Arakali

As far as his career was concerned, IIT Delhi alumnus Rahul Narayan was never a conformist. He loathed the monotony of a conventional work life and wanted to pursue “something larger than the goals of a regular job”. So, in 2010, when he decided to wrap up his three-year stint at Agnicient Technologies—where he was COO—to compete in the Google Lunar XPRIZE, he had no qualms in doing so.

The Google-sponsored Lunar XPRIZE carries a $20 million (₹129 crore) reward for the first privately funded team that successfully soft lands a spacecraft and manoeuvres for 500 metres a moon rover; the rover must also beam high definition images and videos back to the earth from the lunar surface—a feat not attempted even by the celebrated space agency, Indian Space Research Organisation. (Isro’s 2008 Moon Impact Probe, part of the Chandrayaan-1 mission, did not have a soft landing—it crashed, as planned, on the moon’s surface.)

The complexity of the mission is enormous, yet Narayan decided “it’s now or never”. After doing some initial work on the space mission from Delhi, he shifted to tech town Bengaluru in 2011 to start Axiom Research Labs, the company behind TeamIndus, which is currently one of the five finalists, and the only one from India, in the fray for the Lunar XPRIZE. The other finalists are Israel’s SpaceIL, the US’s Moon Express, Japan’s Hakuto and Synergy Moon, which is an international collaboration.

“The genesis [of the project] was to be a part of something bigger than what we do in our daily lives. This looked like something exciting, a target big enough to pursue,” says Narayan, 43, CEO of Axiom Research Labs and Fleet Commander at TeamIndus, which has Star Wars-based designations. TeamIndus was the last to register for the contest, in 2010, three years after the prize was announced.