Does TeamIndus still have a shot at its moonshot?

One by one, as teams racing under the Google Lunar XPRIZE dropped, India’s TeamIndus stood tall. Now five months away from the lift off, it seems standing on shaky ground

With just five months to go for the GLXP launch deadline, a countdown of sorts should have begun, starting with the battery of tests and going up to component arrivals

After all, it is every Indian’s moonshot—Har Indian ka moonshot. But a whole lot of mission progress details have been missing

Predictably, TeamIndus is racing against time, and, of course, money

The Fleet Commander, for the first time, admits he might miss the 28 December deadline and look for another launch window. Does that mean no GLXP for TeamIndus?

July evokes moon memories like no other time of the year. Forty-eight Julys ago, man landed on the moon, setting off a long race to decipher our planetary neighbour. And earlier this month, Moon Express, the private American company that is competing for the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP), unveiled its lander and additional missions to the moon.

July is big for us too. Because away from the bright arclights of PR, this is a good time to ask how is India’s TeamIndus, a proud winner of the $1 million GLXP milestone prize, doing?

AUTHOR

Seema Singh

Seema has over two decades of experience in journalism. Before starting The Ken, Seema wrote “Myth Breaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech”, published by HarperCollins in May 2016. Prior to that, she was a senior editor and bureau chief for Bangalore with Forbes India, and before that she wrote for Mint. Seema has written for numerous international publications like IEEE-Spectrum, New Scientist, Cell and Newsweek. Seema is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MacArthur Foundation Research Grantee.

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