Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organisation, today officially announced ‘mutual’ termination of a launch services agreement signed between it and TeamIndus for the city-based startup’s ambitious moon mission.
TeamIndus was the only Indian team competing for the USD 30 million, Google Lunar XPRIZE that required privately funded teams to land their spacecraft on the surface of the moon, travel 500 metres and broadcast high definition video, images and data back to Earth.
“Antrix and Teamlndus are mutually terminating the launch services agreement signed in 2016,” a release by Antrix Chairman cum Managing Director Rakesh Sasibhushan said.
The release, however, did not mention the reason for the termination of the agreement under which ISRO was to have launched TeamIndus’ spacecraft on its moon mission.
Stating that Antrix remains committed to encouraging and promoting private enterprise in space, it said, “Teamlndus will continue with its goal of building a world class private aerospace company.”
“Teamlndus also thanks Antrix for its assistance and looks forward to collaborating with Antrix in the future to take India higher and further into space. Antrix takes this opportunity to wish Teamlndus all success in its future endeavours,” it added.
TeamIndus has planned to launch its 600 kg spacecraft on board ISRO’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, into an orbit 800 km above the surface of the Earth on its moon mission early this year.
The spacecraft was expected to take 4 kg Japanese Hakutos rover on it to the moon along with its own indigenously designed and developed robotic rover.
An international panel of judges from the Google Lunar XPRIZE after reviewing the moon mission plan of TeamIndus in October during a visti here had said the team has made “substantial progress” and was in the “right direction”.
The deadline for the completion of mission fixed by the Google Lunar XPRIZE is March 31 this year.
Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (Flipkart) and Venu Srinivasan (TVS Group) and K Kasturirangan (former ISRO chief), among others, are supporting TeamIndus as its advisers.
Other than TeamIndus, the other four finalist teams who have a verified launch contracts are SpaceIL (Israel), Moon Express (USA), Synergy Moon (International) and HAKUTO (Japan).
TeamIndus is expected to launch the rover and land on the moon later tho . Lets see how this all goes.
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