It is not a foreign country, or even a foreign world: the U.S.’s manoeuvring to beat China to the satellite has increasingly meant the Moon is an extension of the Earth’s geopolitics and political culture. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between .
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L.P. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon.
President Donald Trump jointly announced a broader strategic technologies framework, including spaceflight. At the ninth India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) headquarters last week, NASA invited the organisation to participate in its ‘Moon Base’ programme, ostensibly as part of the two countries’ Artemis Accords partnership. NASA has trained India’s astronaut candidates for the ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission. NASA’s FY2027 budget request has also described the ‘Moon Base’ as a means to establish U.S.
The target is for it to be humankind’s first outpost on a new celestial body, taking shape around 2030. Since India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023, NASA and ISRO have engaged regularly across several areas. In 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. In 2021, China and Russia announced plans to cooperate on an ‘International Lunar Research Station’ (ILRS), which China described as a long-term lunar science and technology facility, also to be built near the south pole and with a targeted deadline of 2035. Like the Artemis Accords, the ILRS is an international effort, currently involving 17 countries and organisations and more than 50 research institutions worldwide.
The facility will be built piece by piece near the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight is available for longer durations and where permanently shadowed craters hold significant water-ice deposits, according to NASA. Earlier this year, when NASA solicited proposals for payloads to send to the Moon, it said it welcomed foreign entities “except those with bilateral ties to China”. “superiority on the Moon” and to preserve U.S. leadership in space — language with more strategic overtones relative to the agency’s pre-Trump rhetoric.
Taken together, the ‘Moon Base’ is effectively the next phase of the new Artemis programme, tasked with keeping — intermittently at first, and eventually continuously — Artemis astronauts on the Moon. Given how much of U.S. policy is shaped by out-competing China, India’s gains or losses will not be restricted to its space programme either. For instance, ISRO’s engagement with NASA has arguably become more politicised thanks to NASA’s own politicisation by virtue of having to respond to China’s ILRS plans. Contrary to the focus areas of these bodies through much of their histories, future discussions would be poorly served by treating their engagement on the Moon as purely exploratory. For example, the Artemis Accords do not say a signatory cannot cooperate with non-signatory countries. (In June, ISRO also hosted the BRICS Heads of Space Agencies meeting in Bengaluru with China among the participants). However, the Artemis programme itself is increasingly concerned with infrastructure, and building one’s components, equipment, tools, etc. to be interoperable with that infrastructure will thus extend geopolitical alignments on the Earth to the Moon.
Further, as part of NASA chief Jared Isaacman’s overhaul of the Artemis programme earlier this year, in no small part responding to the Trump administration’s December 2025 space policy calling for securing U.S. interests in cislunar space, the profiles of the Artemis III and IV Missions changed. Now, Mission III will be a crewed test flight in Earth orbit in 2027 and Mission IV will attempt the first lunar landing under the programme in 2028.
