This Indian team plans to be the first private company to land on the moon

TeamIndus, a private company located in Bangalore, India, is the one and only Indian entrant into the Google Lunar X-Prize, the international competition to land a private spacecraft on the moon.

For TeamIndus, there are a few, exciting things at stake. If they’re first in the competition, they’ll win $20 million and become the first private company to land on the moon. If they’re successful at all, they’ll achieve something their own government’s space agency has yet to accomplish: soft-landing on the moon.

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.