Rahul Narayan, the founder of Axiom Research Labs and head of TeamIndus, has all time dream of exploring space all his life. Narayan started his entrepreneurship by launching his own software and services products firm called Radiance Networks, which “morphed into another company called Agnicient that he continue to run (as chief operating officer)”. His role at Agnicient Technologies often required him to video conference, besides visiting his customers in the US and UK.
Narayan's unexpected moments towards TeamIndus:
TeamIndus, a private company located in Bangalore, is the one and only Indian entrant into the Google Lunar X-Prize, the international competition to land a private spacecraft on the moon.
It was during one such “videoconferencing call with an American customer who was working with another Google XPrize team” that Narayan got his eureka moment—the idea to set up a team from India to take up this challenge.
The competition and tagline “Moon 2.0” of the Google XPrize caught Narayan’s attention. “I wanted to find out more about it. I looked up the website. There were about 10 teams—some high up there but also some who were ordinary but wanted to follow their dreams. I looked around and said ‘Wow’. Shouldn’t a team from India be part of it?” he says.
The last day of the competition was 31 December 2010, and there wasn’t a single India team. Google asked Narayan if he and his colleagues were interested, and if they could quickly put together a team.
Consequently, “a bunch of folks with absolutely no background in aerospace got into this programme to see how it plays out. It wasn’t a hollow bet, though, because we had to pay an upfront sum of $50,000 to register”. Narayan, who is a computer science graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and calls himself the Fleet Commander of TeamIndus.
Narayan in his words “In fact, if I had a background in aeronautics, I would not have picked up this project. It’s the whole rookie problem—getting solutions when you look at problems,”
Among the five years of project, The first year went by on trying to figure out where to start. “There were questions like—what’s the budget; who is going to help you build this; what do you build; and how do you build it? Do you build something small and efficient? Or do you build something large and very bombastic,”
We had people asking questions like: “Have you figured out your S-Band frequencies for telemetry and tracking?” Narayan could not understand any of this vocabulary other than the words “what” and “frequencies”. Rest of it was Greek and Latin to him.
Narayan realized he would need help from an experienced person in the aerospace industry. The name that came to mind was Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan—an Indian space scientist who headed Isro from 1994 to 2003. He was also a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission. Narayan did not expect an answer, but nevertheless he wrote to the former Isro chief’s office seeking an appointment. He was pleasantly surprised to be granted “half an hour”.
"We were completely blown away with how receptive they (Isro) were about our ideas... Today, even I laugh at what we presented to Isro but we were on the right track"
Kasturirangan assured Narayan and his team that he would help them with technology inputs “as and when time permitted”. He also introduced TeamIndus members to Isro, which lent them credibility.
Experience meets passion
If they’re first in the competition, they’ll win $20 million and become the first private company to land on the moon. Since the company had bit of a late start in the competition, joining three years after the Google Lunar X-Prize was announced. But today, TeamIndus employs over 100 people, was one of three teams to win X-Prize’s $1 million milestone award for lunar lander technology, and is on their way to raising upwards of $10 million.
These factors have helped secured TeamIndus’s spot as a lead contender in the contest, but they certainly have some ways to go. The company has yet to secure a launch contract, for example, which is something they’ll need to do soon if they want to meet the X-Prize’s deadline of landing on the moon by December 2017.
Their Mission to the Moon
Their mission plan involves launching a spacecraft on an Indian rocket into low Earth orbit. The spacecraft will complete two orbits around our planet before initiating a propulsive maneuver that will propel it toward the moon. An insertion burn will place the spacecraft into lunar orbit where it will travel around the moon three to four times before beginning the most complicated part of its mission: descent to the surface.
Once the spacecraft touches down, the TeamIndus rover will deploy from the parent spacecraft. To complete the X-Prize requirements, the lander will roll at least 500 meters along the surface and send high definition images and video of the moon back to Earth.
In addition to a rover, TeamIndus will bring a student science experiment, selected from more than 3,000 possible experiments submitted to their Lab2Moon competition, to the lunar surface.
What Happens When It’s All Over?
So what happens after the contest is over? Teams like Moon Express and Astrobotic, another U.S. based competitor, have stated their intent to sustain a lunar-based business after the prize has been won.
TeamIndus, however, has a different plan. Narayan said that while they don’t expect to continue with lunar-based missions after the contest, they do hope to maintain business in the space industry. He noted that TeamIndus has built up a capability for designing, prototyping, and analyzing space-grade technology that could be used to create a business building satellites.
But for now, their focus remains on the moon. Narayan, along with his 100 employees, are all working toward the goal of bringing an Indian to the moon for the first time, something that he spoke about with great pride.
When asked how it would feel if TeamIndus were to win the Google Lunar X-Prize, Narayan said “It would be the same feeling you’d have if your team won the Cricket World Cup.”
Source : Livemint, Techcrunch
Follow @timepasspopcorn
Article Visitors: 
