The rules of the competition are straightforward: a Rover must complete a 500-metre dash, first past the post, with $20 million (£16m) for the winner. But when that race takes place on the Moon, the rules are the least of your problems.
For one thing, the start line is 384,400km away. Then there's the question of footwear. Any plucky Rover, limbering up on terra firma, must be able to cope with yielding sand and fat, snagging boulders of Moon rock. What to wear? Wheels or caterpillar tracks? Cogs or stilts?
And then there's the question of timing: the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which has challenged teams of amateurs to successfully soft-land on the Moon's surface, race a Rover, and send back photos, begins as soon as the first competitor's lander touches down anywhere on the Moon's surface. But get there too early and you may never make it out of the blocks. At night, temperatures can drop below -200°C, low enough to put a computer into a coma; low enough, in fact, to freeze-weld steel.
Most attempts to reach the Moon over the past 50 years have only managed a hard landing. Taking this approach, all you do is hope that some of the scientific instruments survive the impact. Soft-landing, by contrast, uses liquid-fuel rockets to slow the lander to a few kph in order to allow for a touchdown kiss. Much like trying to land a remote-controlled helicopter from almost half a million kilometres away.
Only three nations have successfully soft-landed on the Moon: the US (Surveyor One, 1966); the USSR (Luna 9, 1966); and China (Chang'e-3, 2013). Each was backed by millions of dollars in funding. There's no such support for XPRIZE teams.
Google announced the Lunar XPRIZE in 2007. It lured dreamers from all of life's strata: beardy, tinkering men in sheds; herds of local roboticists; sparkle-eyed university students. But even in the 21st century, when the cost of components has fallen almost as far as their power has risen, soft-landing on the Moon remains a ludicrously difficult task. The original deadline to claim the prize was December 2012. Google has since extended the deadline three times. Scores of hopefuls have fallen away. Finally, it has been settled: 23:59 on December 31, 2017. The competition has narrowed to five entrants: teams from the US; Israel; Japan; an international team; and Team Indus - the bright hope of India.
Team Indus is a torchbearer of a new India," founder Rahul Narayan tells me. It's late January and Bangalore is sweltering - a far cry from the chilly British winter I was experiencing. Narayan is in his early forties, wearing thick glasses and a polo shirt. He leans forward in his swivel chair. "We are known as the IT back end of the world. But India could be so much more. Our Moonshot could inspire a whole lot of new companies and research. And some of them are going to end up in space."
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The idea that a great race could galvanise industry in this way has historical precedence. In 1919, the French-born New York hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to the first non-stop transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. While a number of reputed aviators vied for the prize and built multi-engine planes with two or three pilots, Charles Lindbergh, a young airmail pilot who flew solo in a single-engine plane, Spirit of St Louis, won. The race encouraged investment in civil aviation. The so-called "Lindbergh boom" accounted for a 30-fold rise in air traffic.
In 2004, the Ansari XPRIZE was established by American engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis after he read Lindbergh's Pulitzer-prize winning book, The Spirit of St Louis. The Ansari XPRIZE offered $10 million to anyone who successfully launched a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize is estimated to have resulted in more than $100 million in investment by the 26 teams that participated, and influenced a resurgence of scientific and engineering competitions. The XPRIZE Foundation, in collaborations with sponsors, now runs multiple competitions, including the Lunar XPRIZE itself.
"There's never been a private mission to the Moon before," says Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer, senior director of the Lunar XPRIZE. "We see this competition as a way to kick-start this private industry moving towards space exploration." It's a hope shared by Narayan and Team Indus' backers, for whom the Lunar prize is merely the first milestone in a more ambitious project. The company already plans to put lightweight satellites into orbit, and there are murmurs of an expedition to Mars.
In India, we love to look at the west and ask, 'Why doesn't a Google come out of India? Why doesn't a Facebook?' Everybody wants to lament the fact, but very few people get up and do something. That's the impact everybody is working towards - that what we're doing here creates industry and fuels an ecosystem."
Like so many other children of the 80s, Narayan became obsessed with space after watching Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos. Star Wars was playing in the cinema, Star Trek on TV. Narayan's head was full of astronomical dreams. Then reality bit. "Back in the 80s, the opportunities were limited," Narayan says. "Space became one of those things that you realise could never become your profession." Narayan settled for computer science. When he graduated, he founded a series of software startups in New Delhi.
Then, seven years ago, one of Narayan's US clients mentioned a team of amateur space scientists. Narayan typed "Lunar XPRIZE" into Google. Narayan never had a clear plan to enter the competition. "There just came a point where the registration deadline was so close we had no option but to register, otherwise we'd be locked out," he says. Narayan and his co-conspirators threw together a plan, then they collated their savings for the $50,000 entry fee.
For the first year or two, Narayan pondered the preposterous challenge he'd set himself. He knew he needed money, but every investor Narayan met was put off by his inexperience. He and his partner, Julius Amrit, were "laughed out of the room" on more than one occasion. One day, Nirmal Gadde, an engineering student, walked into the office to request an internship. Gadde produced a smart and practicable outline for how the team might stage a Moon landing. The work was legitimising. When people asked the difficult questions, Narayan finally had some answers.
Over the past decade, that plan has evolved, but the fundamentals have remained resolute. The prize, if all goes according to plan, will be won for Team Indus by a humble Rover, a lunar exploration vehicle about the size of a large dog, with Wall·E-esque goggle eyes. It will drive 500 metres, take a photograph, and send the evidence back to Earth. (The XPRIZE also offers stretch goals for any team whose Rover is able to travel 5km, collect Nasa artefacts, or survive the night.) But getting the Rover safely to the Moon involves several perilous steps. It will arrive on the Moon's surface via the Lander, a 1.8m tall rocket-propelled box on stilts. The Lander has solar panels on the sides, and a gold-painted orb in its centre filled with jet fuel. With the Rover safely nestled inside, the Lander will leave Earth inside the PSLV (polar satellite launch vehicle), a launch rocket hired from the Indian government. Once spat out by the PSLV the Lander will, if all goes according to plan, enter the Moon's orbit after swinging around the Earth's orbit twice, picking up speed, before catapulting towards its milky white target. If its aim is true, the Lander will be snared by the Moon's gravity. At this point, in a glass-encased room in Banaglore, the team will breathe its first breath of semi-relief.
Once within the Moon's orbit, the Lander will begin its descent. At around three to five metres above the surface, the team will cut the engines. This is to help reduce the amount of lunar dust that will be kicked up, dust that could potentially obscure the vehicle's solar panels. On impact, its aluminium honeycomb legs will crush to absorb the energy. (Some rival teams are using what is known as the "hopper" technique, bounding along the Moon's surface until they come to a standstill.) According to the tests they've already run, Team Indus' Lander will bounce to an estimated height of 300mm before finally settling in the dust.
It's a sound proposal, honed over many months of simulation testing. And it was enough to convince sceptical investors.
"It's all been a lot like falling in love," Narayan says. "Only you know the reasons why it'll work, and they can be difficult to articulate. But there was never any point where I felt it was all lost. It's been more than six years now. Not once have I thought about shutting it down. It's that voice inside. It's following your dream to say: 'This will happen if we just keep going.'"
The office of Team Indus sits on the outskirts of Bangalore, India's startup hub where, in 1969, the government founded the Indian Space Research Organisation. The company moved here from Delhi in 2013. Bangalore is bustling with investors and engineers. Crucially for Team Indus, it's also close to the testing facility. Bangalore is not only a space hub, it's also a melting pot: eavesdrop on a coffee-shop conversation and you will hear any one of the eight languages widely spoken in the city. Some locals bemoan the influx of people from other Indian regions, and the gaps between wealth and poverty are as clear here as anywhere.
The office is located in a converted warehouse; neat phalanxes of desks under a vast, high-ceilinged open space. The Indus team is fuelled by sweet coffee and inspirational quotations stencilled to the walls ("To believe in something and not live it is dishonest" - Mahatma Gandhi). Employees wear job titles lifted from Star Wars: Jedi Trooper, Fleet Commander, Jedi Master and so on. Two thirds of the hundred or so employees are graduate twentysomething engineers. The remainder are sixty- and seventy-something retirees from India's space programmes.
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While in her final month studying at The LNM Institute of Information Technology in Jaipur, Chakshu Gupta, 22, took a test on the website HackerEarth. She breezed through the timed programming challenges and, a few days later, received a call inviting her to an interview at Team Indus. "Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be in space," she told me. "So when I took the call I was like: 'Oh my God, yes. Hire me.'" Arriving at Team Indus, however, was a cold wake-up call. "On my first day, I thought: 'I don't understand a thing.'" At these moments, the veterans are ideally placed to bring the youngsters up to speed.
The septuagenarian employees include notable space scientists such as Srinivasa Hegde, Team Indus' mission director who retired from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in October 2014, a month after successfully sending an orbiter to Mars. (India was the first country to accomplish this feat on its first attempt.) Hegde heard about Team Indus shortly before he left the ISRO. "It was this bunch of youngsters," he says. "I was wondering what they are doing." It didn't take much for Hegde to get swept up in the drama and romance. "I missed working in the space industry. If there was an option to keep working, I would take it."
Hiring Hegde is perhaps the smartest move that Narayan has made. His experience has proved the antidote to Team Indus' naïvety. On arriving, Hegde immediately began to simplify the team's early over-ambitious, high-risk plans. "We needed to find a safe place to land, far away from the Moon's poles and somewhere free from obstacles," he says. "It may not have much there of scientific interest, but that way we could select a site where the temperature is workable." The experience of the veterans tempered the naïve ambitions of the young. Meanwhile, those graduates and interns pushed the veterans to try new approaches.
"I have known some other teams in the competition who started off similar to us, two or three people, and didn't manage the next step because they couldn't find the experts that we have," Narayan says. "Or they couldn't find the right interns. So I think there's a little bit of fortune at play over here in our favour: we managed to find the people who we were looking for."
The possibility of an amateur team performing a soft-landing on the Moon is the result of the falling cost of components. This allows Team Indus to use some off-the-shelf parts. You can't just take any old PC into space, however. Solar radiation can cause transistors to "latch up", which can cause short-circuiting.
It would seem a waste to put a Rover on the Moon only to have it send back a couple of selfies before waiting out the next few billion years until our Sun explodes. So Team Indus is using it to promote scientific experiments.
Lab2Moon is a competition within a competition. Anyone under the age of 25 was invited to submit a design for an experiment that could help to sustain off-world life. One of the finalists, a team of engineering students from the University of California San Diego, hopes to test the viability of yeast on the Moon, to see if it's possible to brew lunar beer.
Team Indus has allocated 250 grams for the winning experiment, which will be carried out on the winning team's behalf. The rest of the free space (a total of 25kg, seven of which includes the Rover) in the Lander is available for sale to other commercial or educational organisations. Magnanimously, Team Indus has agreed to carry its Japanese rival, Team Hakuta's Rover, to the Moon, albeit for a fee. It's partly a way to claw back some of the costs, which is revealed to be around $65 million.
Even if Team Indus wins the $20 million prize, it won't even begin to cover costs. As such, it has had to attract many investors. Many of Team Indus' backers are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. "We are the only Indian team, and that's something that we could leverage to potential investors," Narayan says. Other benefactors are closer to home. "We've had suppliers who would supply us and not invoice us. There is a power in somebody who is doing something risky, but sincerely. You want to root for that person."
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Team Indus doesn't only have to rely on national goodwill. For Chris McKay, a senior planetary scientist at Nasa, the opportunity to carry out experiments on the Moon as a pay-as-you-go payload is alluring because of its affordability. McKay wants to see whether seeds can germinate in the Moon's gravitational and cosmic radiation conditions. If all goes to plan, he hopes to grow the first garden on the Moon. McKay estimates the cost of sending his experiment to the Moon as part of a Nasa payload to be $2 to $3 million. By contrast, hitching a ride aboard the Team Indus lander will cost less than $10,000. (There is still the cost of the ride, for which the going rate is, according to McKay, currently $1 million per kilogram.) "The Lunar XPRIZE will make travel to the Moon faster, cheaper and more numerous," McKay says. "I want all of them to win. I am a customer. I want to send science experiments to the Moon. And I want to send lots of them."
Even if Team Indus manages to invigorate private lunar exploration, some will argue that all this investment will be of small benefit to the vast majority of the population. India's government has, for decades, faced criticism for its gargantuan investment in space programmes while millions live in poverty. In 2011, the World Bank estimated that almost a quarter of India's population - around 276 million people - lived on less than $1.25 per day. That same year the government spent $937 million on its space programme.
Its defenders would argue that India's space programme has always been socially minded: after all, the ISRO was launched in 1945 by Vikram Sarabhai with "Space technology in the Service of humankind" as its founding motto.
In its own way, Team Indus is keeping Sarabhai's vision alive. The company's motto, written on the outside of the building, is "Har India Ka Moonshot" ("Everybody's Moonshot"). From the packed city centres to the remote villages, they want all of India to have a stake in the competition, if not the prize.
Most children living in rural India do not have access to the internet, so Team Indus has partnered with the science outreach foundation Agastya to refit a bus that will, over the next ten months, drive 15,000km around the country, giving schoolchildren the chance to be involved. "The worldview of some of these kids is limited," explains Ravishankar, who previously worked in a government school. "They know their village, but little outside of that. They might have heard of Bangalore, but they may not know where it is on a map. Every kid knows the Moon, though. And so every time they look up they'll say: 'Hey, that's my aspiration on the Moon.'"
Har India Ka Moonshot.
With a slogan like that, it's hard not to get caught up in Team Indus' energy and self-belief.
As I sit chatting to Ravishankar over biryani served on a coconut leaf, I venture a question. "If you do win…"She cuts me off, crossly. "When we win the prize." There's steel in her eyes. By late December, Ravinshankar hopes that her unflinching belief, along with that of everyone else who has been swept up into Indus' story, will be proven. It is estimated that millions of Indians will tune in to national television to watch the PSLV launch, carrying inside it India's Lander and Rover - and all that the two machines represent to the nation.
"In India there were no aerospace companies before us," Fernandes says. "When I joined there was a lot of patriotism. We were doing this for India, but lately, I've felt more like this is something bigger than any one single country. It's something we are doing for humanity itself."
Simon Parkin is a freelance journalist. He wrote about Anonymous' war on Daesh in issue 10.16
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
