 From the spectacular imagery of science fiction fantasized by writers like Arthur C. Clarke, the children of the 60s woke up to the astounding reality of humankind's first step on the lunar surface. Ignition sequence start. We have a lift on. Lift on. Quality base here. Vehicle head planted. Across 41 months, 12 astronauts explored the surface of the moon. This is really a rock and roll ride, isn't it? But in 1972, almost as suddenly as they had begun, the manned missions abruptly ground to a cold halt. We leave as we came. And God willing, as we shall return. No human being has gone to the moon for over 40 years thereafter. So what was the importance of these lunar explorations? And why is it that despite the extraordinary legacy of 17 Apollo missions, the notion of colonizing the moon continues to hang on the horizon? The moon landing in 1969 was undoubtedly an iconic moment. But it was in 1903 that the Wright brothers undertook their first moonshot, transforming a seemingly preposterous idea into a reality that shaped the 20th century. So what defines a moonshot? How does one propel the imagination and stretch a notion beyond the ordinary? It took thousands of years to break our bond with Earth and make the first powered flight. But it only took 66 years to take the next giant leap and accomplish the once unimaginable feet of putting a man on the moon. Apollo 11 carried on board fragments of the original Wright airplane sealed in a plaque that honored two of humankind's greatest flight achievements. When I think about why we humans like to explore, why we push the frontiers, I think it's were genetically driven that way. And there's a reason for that. If we were not explorers, if we were happy just sitting at home, then if there was a disaster that occurred, we'd be wiped out. Our entire species would be wiped out. On the other side, there are the questions of exploration, which is more than just thinking about far reaching locations in the universe. So you'd like to know why they formed like this? And are there locations in the solar system where human beings can go, settle, explore, and also to make sure that the humankind has more than one place to habitat in the solar system? Earth where we live has 70% water on it. Moon is our closest neighbor. And finding water on the moon has been one of the most spectacular finds of the century. And that came from Chandrayaan 1. Understanding the moon will give humanity an understanding of how life evolved on Earth. And Moon is so much part of our everyday life in India. As a country, India's fascination with space goes back almost 4,000 years to the Vedas. And in 499 CE, without any sophisticated instruments, Aryapat, the ancient Indian astronomer, professed that the Earth spins on its own axis and that the moon revolves around the Earth. But would Aryapat have ever imagined that one day man would actually set foot on the moon? Just like people at the beginning of the 20th century would never have imagined that one day air travel would be quite so routine. So that brings us to an interesting question. In the near future, do you think space travel will be as mundane as air travel is today? My personal dreams have been since my childhood to go to space. I grew up in the 60s when Apollo was just starting when Star Trek was coming on TV as a show and I believed and dreamed that I have a chance to go and I said I'm going to create a prize for private spaceflight. A prize that when it's won gives me my ticket to space and that was the birth of the Google Lunar X Prize. Today we're challenging private teams around the world to design and build robotic explorers and race them to the surface of the moon. The Google Lunar X Prize is the largest incentivized competition to date. Designed to seek breakthroughs in space, it offers a colossal 30 million US dollars as prize money. The reward will go to the first privately funded team that softlands a rover on the moon within a stipulated deadline, then navigates it at least 500 meters and transmits high definition mooncasts back to earth. These people are trying to demystify this entire concept of a lunar exploration by taking it down to a small group of people networking with the world community and then trying to come out with a viable model and within 36 months to 40 months you can reach from practically nothing you can reach the moon. I think this is exceptional. When the contest registration opened in 2007, the only prerequisite for a team to apply was a dream in their eyes and an inspired vision to break open the arena of space. One day before the close of registration in 2010, nearly 30 teams from across the globe had signed up for this audacious space race. But with an impressive self-reliant space program to boast about, India's absence from the start line was conspicuous. I'm a computer engineer and I've been running a software services company now for over a decade and a half. But the dream was always to build something which goes, you know, throws a ball out of the park. I'm an ex fighter pilot with the Indian Air Force. Air Force, it primarily teaches you to live on the edge, to go after those dangers which are existing in a controlled environment. I'm an electronics and telecommunication engineer. From there, I have been a serial entrepreneur. Technology excites me a lot. I'm from Calcutta in my schooling there and then I got into IT and that's where I met Raul. Now, we have been doing all kinds of crazy things all along for more than 20 years and some of them were successful, some of them were not, but 31st December 2010 will go down in history. Once, Tommy Knight, we got to know about this competition and we found out that there were a galore of teams, 33 plus teams, all across the world and there was no Indian team in the competition. So we said we have to enter the fray. When the idea of going to the moon came up and we discussed this, it seemed like the the next thing to do and I think we ran out of doing crazy stuff on planet earth. So that's the next phase to go. We kept looking and looking at how one could participate in this, how could India participate in this and we felt let's just go ahead and put together our own team and try and make this happen. But because this was so big, we really didn't know what will work and what will not work. On December 31st 2010, the closing day of the contest registration, these enterprising young men threw up their comfortable jobs, put together their life savings and signed up to take their shot at the moon. Very few startups would be bold enough to undertake a moon mission. Headquartered in Bengaluru, India's aerospace hub, Team Indus is a group of nonconformist, unconventional dreamers who are racing against time to fulfill an audacious vision, to be the first privately funded enterprise to build and land a rover on the moon. For me, the moonshot began with first to overcome the fear and the anxiety and the uncertainty of even trying to do something like this. The challenges that we have is on technology fund, on convincing people that this is doable. First two years was a big struggle to tell people about a fairy tale and make them believe in that that is a humongous task. Mind you, it's more difficult to convince them to reach the moon. That is what we are finding now. I mean, almost every quarter, you know, we will say, okay, let's survive the next quarter and then we take a call whether this is going forward or not. And in those months, out of nowhere, you know, people would come forward or somebody will help us out in something, get an access to something. And that helped us, you know, grow and grow and grow and grow. To deliver a moon mission, team and us will need to charter a ride that costs about $25 million on a launch vehicle developed by ISRO. The PSLV will transport their lander into low earth orbit from where they will detach and coast to the moon. The funding required is $35 million in which bulk of it is towards the launch vehicle that we need. The prize money on offer is far less than what it is going to cost any team to do and that's the challenge. The biggest if they need to find the money. Money, money, money. That's what makes everything go and they need a lot of money. The ambitious technology challenge is compounded by the struggle to raise the enormous funds required for this mission. A sum that the team hopes to collect through a novel mix of equity financing, payload sales and crowdsourcing. Well X Prize is all about crowdsourcing of ideas. The fascinating thing about the team in this platform is how ordinary people potentially can engage with the mission in real time in a way that a government couldn't possibly permit and I think that's that will be the exciting genre of crowdsourcing on this project. World over, space exploration is a domain that has conventionally been managed by governments. Lunar programs like that of NASA and ESA notch up astronomical costs that expend the taxpayers money. So the challenge was to reinvent space exploration by finding a way to do it on a budget. We believe that these things are all possible. It's really a matter of making it cheaper, faster, easier, automating it, making it something that not, you know, a hundred thousand government employees but a dozen entrepreneurs can do. And I just wanted to find the top teams around the world who wanted to give it a shot. So this is a nice way of introducing the small guy who does not look at the big problems and solves the smaller problems and somehow bridges the gap. So it's end of the day, it's a problem. The problem statement is go from point A to point B, do it as efficiently as possible as quickly as possible and the least amount of money. Very rapidly, the original four-member team multiplied to include a highly motivated group of budding aerospace engineers, some straight off campus who are trying to achieve what only large governments with enormous budgets have done before. It's a very big competition that we are in and we are representing India. So everything is very, very exciting when you work on a mission like this. So anything in space, anything small goes wrong. It might lead to catastrophic mistakes. So we ensure that even the smallest details we look into it. I graduated my B. Tech in aerospace engineering from UPS Dehradun. It's the lander structure that you see over here. That's the structure that I have designed and the biggest challenge is to land something where you don't know what your conditions are. I'm an aerospace engineer. I am doing finite element analysis on the entire structure. We have softwares where we can model the structure and apply those loads and according to those stress levels we can design our structure over and over again. I belong to a small town near Guntur and I take care of the thermal subsystem at Team Indus. Thermal subsystem involves protecting the spacecraft against harsh environmental conditions. I was a very naughty kid. Even till date my parents don't believe that I'm doing stuff like this. I'm working in the missions part here. I need to devise and deploy as clever schemes. When the lunar lander comes close to the surface of the moon then I need to ensure that it lands in a proper manner. I'm a B. Tech aerospace engineer from IIT Kharagpur. From then I'm working on the mission orbits. The mission orbit is the path on which the spacecraft will travel the approximately four lakh kilometers to the moon. Complex maneuvers need to be computed to keep it aligned on this course. At 12 years of age the youngest space ace in this crew is plainly defining his own orbit. PSMV is going to inject us into highly electrical orbit like as you can see here it has a very high apogee the highest point of the orbit and it has a relatively low perigee so I have to design the trajectory of the total mission however to go from the launch vehicle separation to descent orbit. This is the last phase of our prototyping and we over the next three weeks should complete it so we got a lot of work coming up all teams need to start firing at the same time. This is it. Going forward the biggest challenge that we foresee for ourselves is actually to reduce the mass of the spacecraft further and this is only to be able to carry more scientific payload to the moon for any of the further experiments that we or the industry at large we want to conduct over there. Today we're just wiring up the rover we're going to see how the rover reacts they're going to be checking its voltage its temperature. I'm pretty nervous I'm pretty excited both at the same time we're we're going to see how the rover reacts to all the commands that we give let's see how it moves and let's see let's see whether the responses are as per what we expected it to be. The PSLV as it launches the most of the loads will be taken by the chassis so we have to redesign this part of it actually the chassis such that the rover can sustain all the heavy loads at the time of launch. The prototype you are seeing here we are calling it ECA 4.4 it has to deliver on the lunar surface under one by six gravity. The mass height has been chosen according to the imaging capability so that it can image all the obstacles ahead of us and it will help to generate their digital elevation model. Once the team into spacecraft touches down on the moon the rover will be deployed to begin its mission much like a video game designated drivers will steer it remotely over the uneven lunar terrain while its three megapixel camera will stream pictures and video down to earth. So we're looking at things people have not done earlier we're looking at information which is not easily available but designed by a group of young 21 to 26 year olds that's our team age. The days I come to work and nobody is signed in the register downstairs and I wonder you know how come no one's coming and it's full upstairs why they've been there for two days just sleeping there eating drinking with one project. So to me they are a role model for a spirit which is important for this country to transform itself as a 21st century nation with its own importance in the committee of nations in this world. Of the 29 teams that registered for the contest only 18 remain standing in this surreal race to the moon but Team Indel's has an advantage that no other team has for it rides on the triumph of India's indigenous space program considered one of the finest in the world. In 2014 rocket scientists from India's premier space research agency drew global attention by injecting a spacecraft into the Martian orbit in their first attempt that too in a mere 70 million dollars a tenth of NASA spend on its Mars mission. Globally if you take India is one among the first six in the world as far as space is concerned we are enhancing our capability also we are striving to become state of the art in this area but for this what we are looking for is an enhanced role for the Indian industry so that they would be able to build an operational launch vehicle or an operational satellite with the participation of private sector public sector and this. For Team Indus the next destination is Char one of the best known spaceports of the world it has successfully launched over 40 foreign satellites and more than a hundred space missions with the help of its expendable launch system the PSLV but despite this remarkable record to its credit critics often argue that India's extraterrestrial outlays are not justified in a country where over 300 million people still live below the poverty line. Now this is the old question saying you know when you can't cure the common cold why you go into the moon the way to work on the common cold is to do high order science that can enable you to get a vaccine that will take care of things like metaphorically the common cold but malaria tuberculosis things which affect our country so seriously and I do think therefore investment in high science and technology is part of solving the basic problems of this country it is not in either or. Space programs typically necessitate pushing the limits of technology and human endurance they thus provide a unique environment for scientific innovation results of which profoundly impact our daily lives. Well we all think of space explorations you know putting a man on the moon and what's fascinating for me is everything that goes around that whether it's new innovations in satellites nano satellites that could profoundly change the way we all communicate the food that needs to be eaten on a mission the clothes that need to be worn the ripple effect of potential downstream innovations that can benefit everyone that that's what excites me. With their mission strategies and prototypes having passed some stringent tests the coming one year is critical for team Indus as it enters the high risk phase of this mission but in what can be seen as a significant endorsement of their ingenuity in January 2015 the Indian team was awarded a prestigious milestone prize along with a whopping one million dollars. We keeps talking about the 83 you know World Cup and we said that before that cricket was another game that was played in India and the fact that an Indian team went out there and said that you know we can do it and they did it is something very similar to what we're doing we're saying that first let's look at the pinnacle of science and technology and engineering and let's compete at the world and see if we can win and if they actually win that prize just think of what it would mean to the thousands of scientists and engineers and technologists who dream of doing something as exciting and as monumental as this because this is a huge grand challenge. The Google Luna X prize has erased geographical boundaries and is banking on the collective wisdom of 18 teams from across the globe. These gutsy new space entrepreneurs plan to go out Luna prospecting for valuable natural reserves even while understanding the moonscape for possible human habitation. Humanity should now explore other locations so that the risk element related to a wiping out of the human kind which has been so well evolved to the present state can be avoided to a good extent. They're calling the moon the eighth continent and that's where everybody wants to be. You could soon have people going in and out of the earth orbit and going towards the moon and then maybe going to Mars and maybe going beyond. I think in the future instead of like sitting in a train waiting to reach Delhi in two days we'll be sitting on a spacecraft waiting to reach moon orbit. Spurred by the inherent desire to discover the next generation of dreamers and explorers is all set to take their giant leap. Being the only Indian team in this prestigious global competition team and us is confident that they will aspire, believe and create a legacy. We have the talent, we have the caliber, we have the initiative and we have the motivation and we have the patriotism so we see it all the way through for India for Team Indus for us. The idea that a group of entrepreneurs can build a spacecraft and go toe to toe with the largest governments in the world that's amazing. This is not whether we do it this is just a matter of time and Team Indus is definitely going to do this. It's just great to see a team of young Indians take up a challenge of this magnitude and you're competing with the rest of the world but in many ways you're competing with yourself to say hey we can do it. We're gonna be there before anybody else. Everyone here realizes it that you're making history here and I think that's what drives people the most. I think would be extraordinary if Team Indus put the Indian pride colors on the surface of the moon. This was the first time you're seeing an entrepreneurial effort in space research which is what Team Indus stands for and I think when they win India wins. So this is a moonshot hopefully it's not a long shot we're gonna try our best together there. A few years down the line I would like to look up on the moon and tell my friends and my family that we put something out there. The countdown to ignition has begun and the excitement is palpable. Team Indus has succeeded in putting India on the highway to the moon and is all set to create an epic future for us. Who knows maybe one day soon we'll be looking up at the moon to see lights blinking down at us. After all colonizing the moon no longer seems like such a long shot.