Moon 2.0: Team Indus plans to raise $40 mn for lunar mission, spacecraft structure ready

Image credit: TeamIndus/Twitter

New Delhi: Team Indus, the only Indian team to qualify for the Google Lunar XPrize competition to land a rover on the Moon, is planning to raise $40 million for the lunar mission.

As per a report in TOI, the aerospace start-up led and co-founded by Rahul Narayan, a Delhi-based IT professional, plans to raise through a combination of corporate sponsorship and crowdfunding before its scheduled lunar rover mission launch in December, 2017.

The company has raised $20 million so far in equity funding and another $20 million in payload partnerships.

The mission referred to as "Moon 2.0" calls for designing a lunar lander and two rovers. The two rovers together are planned to have a mass of around 15 kg. One rover, which will compete for the main task, is required to travel more than 500 meters on the lunar surface and send feedback to the Earth.

The Bengaluru-based Axiom Research Labs Pvt Ltd is being financially backed by a host of bigwigs including Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Accel Partners' Subrata Mitra and Shekhar Kirani.

It is said that the final assembly of the rover and spacecraft, which are under construction at the government's National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), will happen at the Team Indus facility in North Bengaluru.

“Our spacecraft structure is ready. The software and the mission command centre is up and running and is undergoing testing. This mission is challenging. ISRO's Chandrayaan 1 was an orbital mission, while our spacecraft has to land on the Moon,” Narayan was quoted as saying by TOI.

He added that the flight testing of the spacecraft and payloads will happen next month at ISRO's facility.

Team Indus, which was among five out of 29 teams to have been awarded for clearing a specified test, will launch the moon lander and rover using a PSLV rocket operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in December. It hopes to land on the moon on the Republic Day next year.

The private space company also plans to build satellites for global companies that want to hurl their satellite systems into space, offering various services such as, navigation, surveillance and internet.