BANGALORE, INDIA – Among the five teams competing in the world's first international lunar probe contest, one of them, India's TeamIndus, is unique in its beginning and breadth of cooperation with a rival team. The Bangalore-based startup firm is the only Indian team in the Google Lunar XPRIZE contest, in which five privately funded finalists are competing to land their spacecraft on the moon and deploy robotic rovers on its surface. TeamIndus has partnered with the Japanese team to transport the latter's rover as well as its own to the moon using its own spacecraft, which is to be launched aboard an Indian rocket in March. It is the first collaboration between two of the contest's private enterprise competitors. "It's a privilege that we have the Japanese team flying with us to the moon surface," said Rahul Narayan, founder of TeamIndus.

The recent "Moon Base Alpha"release by Elon Musk and ESA's recent moon village announcement calling for increased private-government partnership, point towards a growing impatience to kick start large-scale lunar exploration and settlement. The Google Lunar XPrize initiative, which was launched in 2010 to encourage low cost robotic space exploration, is another such initiative, and is likely to give a much necessary boost to the sector. A review panel of the international competition arrived in Bengaluru, India, on a on a five-day inspection of Team Indus, one of the five privately-funded teams in contention for the $30 million grand prize. SpaceIL (Israel), Moon Express (USA), Synergy Moon (International), Team Indus (India) and Hakuto (Japan) are all gearing up to make a space craft that will make a soft-landing on the moon, with a robot that can travel at least 500 meters on the moon surface and send back high-quality images to Earth. All the five teams had won a million dollar prize for demonstrating the landing technology of their spacecraft on the moon in 2015.

A Japanese team comprising Tokyo-based startup ispace and Tohoku University expects to complete its moon-bound robot contestant for Google Inc.'s exploration contest by next January. Hakuto will compete against 15 other teams from around the world to win the Google Lunar X Prize, the world's first private-sector competition to explore the lunar surface. The teams will send probes developed with money and technology from the private sector to the moon, get them to travel 500 meters or farther on its dusty surface, and transmit 360-degree images back to Earth. The first team to complete the mission will win the grand prize of 20 million. While the deadline for completing the mission is the end of 2017, none of the teams has landed a probe there yet.