India, a rising space power, is forging closer ties with NASA Ars Technica

When the Indian ambassador to the United States joined his country in the Artemis Accords last month, he signaled that the world’s most populous country, with a growing prowess in spaceflight, could turn to the United States as a partner in space exploration.

India has become the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a set of non-binding principles between like-minded nations that guide a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The agreements cover the international registration of man-made space objects, the open release of scientific data and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other principles.

The Artemis Accords began under the Trump administration, an effort spearheaded by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and Mike Gold, a longtime space industry lawyer and official. Bill Nelson, the head of NASA under President Biden, has embraced the accords. He said principles are just common sense.

Come to the aid of someone in trouble. You try to have a commonality of parts, you respect each other’s turf, Nelson said.

Details about future US-India cooperation remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One of the goals of Nelson’s trip will be to define overarching goals for a strategic framework for human spaceflight cooperation.

Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there is no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon and eventually send humans to Mars.

There is no implication that a signatory to the Artemis Accords is also part of the Artemis program, Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accord, a list that includes European space powers and Japan, has its own human spaceflight program. India is developing a spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people to low Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned.

The fact that they are a nation that intends to fly its own astronauts in the future, is that significant? The answer is yes, Nelson said. I think it is significant that a major country that is not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory.

“I have described India as a sleeping and rapidly awakening giant,” Gold told Ars. space flight.

Through the Artemis program, NASA hopes to land astronauts on the lunar surface later this decade for the first time since 1972. NASA is officially targeting the end of 2025 for the first Artemis crew to land on the Moon, but the program it’s almost certain to slip as new spacesuits from Axiom Space and a new human-friendly lunar lander from SpaceX progress through development and testing.

What’s next?

Where India could fit into the Artemis program is yet to be determined. But this year India has launched as many space missions as Japan and Europe combined, with another milestone launch scheduled for later this month with a robotic spacecraft that will mark India’s second attempt to gain a controlled landing on the Moon, after a failed landing in 2019.

India successfully sent a spacecraft to Mars a decade ago, and international satellite operators regularly rely on Indian rockets to get their missions into orbit.

“They come to Artemis with activities that are already directly relevant to the program,” Gold said of India. “Neither the US nor India need to change their trajectories. Their businesses are already highly complementary.”

Prior to the signing of the Artemis Accords, Indian Space Research Organisations, the Indian Space Agency and NASA were already working together on a sophisticated Earth observation radar satellite called NISAR, scheduled for launch in 2024. An Indian satellite launched on the space shuttle in the 1980s.

But ISRO and NASA haven’t worked together in any meaningful way in the realm of human spaceflight or space exploration.

The US-India partnership in space could take a step forward next year with an Indian astronaut flying to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low Earth orbit. The Indian astronaut, as yet unnamed, will likely fly a short-lived mission to the ISS, according to Nelson.

Only one Indian citizen has ever flown into space. Rakesh Sharma, an Indian Air Force pilot, was launched to the Soviet Union’s Salyut space station for a nearly eight-day mission in 1984.

India’s space program has maintained closer ties with Russia in the past. Russia supplied upper stage engines for India’s GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media.

Despite India’s openness to a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains tied to Russia. India still imports significant quantities of Russian oil and has not officially condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But the Russian space program is no longer the force it once was. China is now the rival space power of the United States.

Chinese space officials said in May they intend to land a crew on the Moon by 2030, a harbinger of long-term ambitions to develop a lunar research station in partnership with Russia, which has indicated it will not join the Artemis Accords or to the United States- led the Artemis program. China says it is recruiting other countries for its Moon exploration effort.

Like China, NASA wants to expand its roster of partners beyond traditional collaborators. In addition to European countries, Japan and Canada, signatories to the Artemis Accords include Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. Ecuador signed the Artemis Accords on the same day as India.

Ultimately, if enough countries support the Artemis Accords, space policy experts hope the accord will foster an environment in which the principles outlined in the accords become “rules of behavior” in space. India, with its burgeoning space program and population of 1.4 billion, carries a lot of weight.

While China and Russia may be unlikely to sign, the deals were designed to influence those countries by setting a precedent,” said Gold, now an executive at space company Redwire. “The precedent of the deals will impact nations that don’t sign and that precedent will be more powerful with the accession of India.”

Smooth sailing not guaranteed

As NASA discovered with Russia, cooperation between nations in spaceflight sometimes presents diplomatic hurdles.

India shot down one of its satellites in a 2019 test of an anti-satellite weapon that the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, said was a “proud moment” for the Indian people that would catapult the country into one echelon of global space powers. At the time, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called the anti-satellite test a “terrible thing” that was “not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”

The high-speed collision between an Indian missile and its target satellite flooded low Earth orbit, including the region of space traversed by the ISS, with hundreds of debris fragments. Those bits of debris, which have now re-entered the atmosphere, could have endangered the space station or other orbiting satellites.

One of the principles of the Artemis Accords is an agreement among the signatories to “preserve a safe and sustainable environment in space is central to both public and private businesses”.

The United States has since pledged to stop carrying out anti-satellite tests after already demonstrating its ability to shoot down satellites on multiple occasions. China and Russia have also demonstrated anti-satellite weapons.

“We don’t do ASAT tests,” Nelson said. “This is our position.”

Gold said the thrust of the Artemis Accords is to establish standards of behavior for nations operating in deep space, such as near the Moon or Mars, and don’t necessarily cover what happens closer to Earth. “This is intentional because activities in Earth orbit are already highly regulated and there are established processes for this.