Entrepreneur Wants Kids to Have Tea on the Moon

Nearly 40 years after Americans first set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 with NASA's historic Apollo 11 flight, a host of private rocketeers are hoping to follow to win a $30 million prize. Here, SPACE.com looks at Chandah, one of 17 teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize:

Team Chandah began with a Pakistani community leader from 100 years ago predicting that descendants would have tea on the moon.

Adil Jafry never forgot those words as he made his way through the business world, and so the immigrant entrepreneur immediately became entranced when the Google Lunar X Prize was announced. Not to mention that his children, ages 5 and 9, had been attending space camp in Houston.

"They were talking about NASA this and NASA that, and there was a lot of paraphernalia around the house," Jafry said. "It somehow all catalyzed and came together, but wasn't something I had necessarily thought about as a plan."

Newcomer to space

What was once the domain of NASA space exploration has opened up to private companies, and the Google Lunar X Prize symbolizes that shift to Jafry and other entrepreneurs. He has already named Team Chandah?s future spacecraft Shehrezade, the same name of his daughter, taken from the Persian queen in ?One Thousand and One Nights.?

Yet Jafry comes as an outsider to NASA and the space industry, readily acknowledging himself as ?not the hare? in the race. The Google Lunar X Prize's technical challenge requires teams to land a robot on the moon, move at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and beam high definition views back to Earth.

"I've jumped into the deep end of this competition, and I'm still trying to figure things out," Jafry told SPACE.com, adding that he "joined to learn" and was enjoying the experience.

The challenges for the one-man Team Chandah appear daunting, but Jafry made his fortune with startups. Most recently, he formed TARA Energy in the wake of energy giant Enron's collapse by recruiting many close friends who had just lost mid-level jobs. Today TARA is one of the largest independent retail electricity providers in Texas, with Jafry as chairman and CEO.

Jafry now hopes to gather similar talent among scientists, astrophysicists, aerospace engineers, and businessmen to get Chandah going. He noted that he would like to see collaboration with other Google Lunar X Prize teams, having kept in contact with many.

"It never crossed my mind that Chandah could triumph over others without collaboration, so a win would be a shared win," Jafry said.

Business expertise

Team Chandah could certainly lend its business expertise to the critical problem all Google Lunar X Prize teams struggle with — how to find people or companies willing to fund a seemingly wild venture.

"I don't think venture capital or private equity will give money for just the competition, because you'll be spending multiples of that in terms of price," Jafry observed. His initial assessment suggests that most teams will end up spending several times the $20 million prize money for first place, and many other teams agree — with some exceptions.

Teams may require a long-term business plan that allows them to thrive regardless of Google Lunar X Prize success. That still stands as a challenge within the fledgling private sector of space exploration and travel.

?The downsides should be covered as much as possible,? Jafry said, adding that a ?good risk-return model? should also reward investors many times over if successful.

Ultimately Jafry sees a win for Team Chandah or other teams as a win for all space entrepreneurs and a greater vision that surpasses any individual team..

"To the extent that winning the competition makes an economic model successful, that'd be phenomenal," Jafry said.

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