A year after the launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission and the Axiom-4 mission that sent astronaut-candidate Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station, the U.S. space agency has formally extended an invitation to India to join its ambitious ‘Moon Base’ programme under the Artemis Accords.
This said, the Indian government’s privatisation drive has come in for criticism by the Congress party, especially by its general secretary (communication) Jairam Ramesh. In response, Union Minister of State Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said the country’s space programme was being scaled up, not scaled back.
At the ninth meeting of the India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group in Bengaluru, NASA invited the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to be part of this programme, through which it is looking to establish a lunar outpost — potentially the first of its kind where astronauts will make the moon’s south pole area their home, where they will live, work, and conduct scientific activities over the next decade, perhaps beyond. Importantly, it will be ISRO’s first launch since the failure of the PSLV-C62 mission/EOS-N1 mission in January this year. If the engine successfully passes all its qualification tests, India will become only the fourth country in the world to have FFSC engine technology, which allows for cleaner launches. The other three countries with the technology are the usual suspects: Russia, the U.S., and China. It so happens that only three private sector entities have successfully developed the same technology, and they are in the U.S. and China: SpaceX and Stoke Space in the former and Land Space in the latter. And of them, SpaceX’s Raptor is the sole operational FFSC engine worldwide.
the invitation extends the growing ties in the space sector between the two countries, especially under the Artemis Accords, to which India signed up in 2023 While ISRO has yet to take a call on being part of the Moon Base programme. For ISRO, the invite offers a chance to be part of an international collaboration and gain exposure ahead of its Chandrayaan-4 and crewed moon missions. At the time of writing, its launch was scheduled to take place at around 3 am on September 4 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. India’s private space sector has been on a roll since Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 launch. It achieved another milestone as Bengaluru-based Astrobase Space Technologies unveiled India’s first privately built 800 kN full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) LOX-methane rocket engine, named ‘Everest’. With the Indian space economy set a target worth of $44 billion by 2033, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) — the nodal regulator — has opened the door wider for private sector participation by issuing an ‘expression of interest’ (EoI) to operate and manage the Small-Satellite Launch Complex in Kulasekarapattinam, Tamil Nadu.
