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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