ISRO

Team Indus a Bangalore, India based technology startup is one of few companies in the world and only company from India that have ventured into highly costly and research intensive aerospace industry. Team Indus (Axiom Research Labs) founded by Rahul Narayan, Dilip Chabria, Indranil Chakraborty, Sameer Joshi and Julius Amrit has plans to land on moon. ISRO a Govt. of India organization is the only agency in India that works in aerospace field and has been working on a mission to mars called Chandrayaan since 2003.  There are only three countries in world that have soft-landed on moon (China, USSR & US). Soft landing means lading with controlled speed without any damage to spacecraft and surface.

 Image Credit: Wikipedia

This Indian space startup is participating in Google Lunar XPRIZE competition and working on a spacecraft that will be capable of landing on the moon along with a rover that will explore moon. Google will be offering $30 million as  prize money to the winners of this competition (cost of this kind of project is way hire than prize money offered by Google). Team Indus was one of five teams selected to compete in the Milestone prizes and they won $1M as a Milestone prize for their landing technology. To win the contest participating team has to land a robot on the moon, cover 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send data and pictures back to the earth.

Team Indus started working in 2010. The team which had no experience in space technology worked hard for three years and came up with first design in 2013. Adimurthy, a retired  ISRO scientist rejected their design after first review in 2013. Indus team worked hard and was ready with a new propulsion system in a year.

Propulsion technology innovation

Since propulsion technology used by other countries is highly confidential and inaccessible, Team Indus decided to design their own propulsion system. Team Indus is going to use a propulsion systems that  has never been used before for such critical space mission. They are using a combination of small fixed thrust engines and produce the variable thrust effect using control algorithms. So what other space organizations have been doing with hardware, Team Indus is trying to do with software algorithms.

Team Indus is being led by Rahul Narayana along with more than 20 ISRO scientist. Team Indus with more than 100 employees has secured funding to the tune of $35 M from Pallav Nadhani (Fusion Charts), Subrata Mitra & Shekhar Kirani (Accel Partners), Sharad Sharma (former Yahoo India R&D head), Vivek Raghavan (chief product manager of UIDAI), Pallaw Sharma (director of analytics at Microsoft),  Bala Parthasarthy(AngelPrime angel investors), Sunil Kalra(entrepreneur & investor) and Paras Chopra.

Team Indus has acquired a launch vehicle (PSLV) from ISRO on commercial rates for sending their spacecraft and rover to moon from Sriharikota in 2017. It would be interesting to see who lands on moon first, ISRO, Team Indus or Elon Musk‘s SpaceX which has already started booking for earth to moon flight.