【A Thought of Ecstasy】

Rahul Narayan had no clue about space. In 2010,A Thought of Ecstasy he was in the software industry, running a startup that developed products for an ecommerce company.

Who knew seven years later, he would on his way sending a rover to the moon?

SEE ALSO: A private spaceflight company just got approval to land a spacecraft on the moon

Narayan and his friends were intrigued by Google Lunar X-Prize competition announced in 2010.

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The competition invited private companies to land a rover on the moon, make it travel for 500 meters and beam high resolution photos and videos back to Earth.

"We were looking and saying that if any Indian team is doing this we got to be a part of this. Whether building software or doing marketing, this is the project of a lifetime," Narayan told Mashabletwo months ago at the Team Indus campus in Bangalore.

"We asked around and there was no Indian team. Therefore, the only option left was that we had to be the Indian team. So going from 'hey, we will help in marketing' and being a part of the team to figuring out everything from the basics and Wikipedia [on] how to build a spacecraft. That is the true story."

On Thursday, Team Indus announced it had become the first private company to have secured a dedicated rocket from the government-funded Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

If all goes according to plan, Team Indus' home-manufactured spacecraft will fly aboard ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PLSV) during a three-day launch window beginning Dec. 28, 2017.

The PSLV will inject the spacecraft in an orbit 880 km x 70,000 km around the Earth. The spacecraft will then embark upon a 21-day journey and land in Mare Imbrium, a region in the North-Western hemisphere of the Moon.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Team Indus was one of the last teams to register for the competition.

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Over the last couple of years, they went from figuring out whether they could do it, to hiring a team that could take them closer to achieving the task.

But the watershed moment came when Lunar X-Prize shortlisted them for a Milestone challenge and they won $1 million towards landing technology.

Since then, Team Indus has raised funding from renowned Indian industrialists and entrepreneurs like Ratan Tata of the Tata Group, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and many more.

One of the rules of the Google Lunar X-Prize is that the mission should be at least 90 percent funded by private sources.

The group has built a team comprising 100 people, mostly youngsters fresh out of college along with 20 retired ISRO scientists with rich experience of space missions.

Team Indus was one of the last teams to register for the competition.

For its part, ISRO is now one of the world's most renowned space agencies, having successfully sent missions to Mars, launched record number of satellites in a single mission and helped India establish its own GPS system.

Team Indus is now the fourth team worldwide to have secured a launch contract and considers itself as one of the front runners in the challenge.

Israeli team SpaceIL secured a contract in Oct. 2015 and is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the second half of next year.

American team Moon Express announced its contract with Rocket Lab's Electron rockets and is also scheduled for launch in 2017.

An international team, Synergy Systems, became the third team to secure a launch vehicle and is also scheduled to go to the Moon in the second half of 2017. One of the team members, Interorbital Systems, will be the launch provider and will use a Neptune 8 rocket.

But the Google Lunar X-Prize is just the beginning for the Indian startup, which feels it already has a foot in the door in the growing private industry of space exploration.

"As Team Indus goes ahead, whether or not it wins the competition, I think one impact that will come out, is any group of five people can start and build something that can land on the moon.

"If that is possible, then anything is possible," Narayan says.