“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the English novelist L.P. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon. 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.
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. According to NASA, 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. The target is for it to be humankind’s first outpost on a new celestial body, taking shape around 2030.
NASA is leaning heavily on private industry for this, having already awarded contracts to Astrolab (worth $219 million) and Lunar Outpost ($220 million) for lunar terrain vehicles, Blue Origin ($188 million) for delivery task orders, and Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines ($600 million) for four robotic missions to the Moon to deliver equipment. Intuitive is also developing a relay satellite under a separate contract.
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. 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.
Deepening partnership
Since India signed the Artemis Accords in 2023, NASA and ISRO have engaged regularly across several areas. NASA has trained India’s astronaut candidates for the ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission. In 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump jointly announced a broader strategic technologies framework, including spaceflight.
ISRO also launched the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, a major scientific mission that has been a decade in the making. NASA instruments are slated to fly on forthcoming Chandrayaan missions just as they did on the first three.
While it seems almost facile to suggest the U.S. also engage with China considering the latter’s formidable spaceflight capabilities — many industry experts agree the age of U.S. dominance in spaceflight is in its twilight years — the two countries’ actions mean that the lines they have drawn on the Earth are set to be extended to the Moon, and that will pose new challenges for India.
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.
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”. NASA’s FY2027 budget request has also described the ‘Moon Base’ as a means to establish U.S. “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.
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.
Suppose China invites India to join the ILRS in 2035. (In fact, the Moon could become one of the few domains in which India and China may have a practical incentive to cooperate on the Moon even while competing on the Earth, and India should endeavour to preserve rather than foreclose that possibility.) The government can say ‘yes’, but if China uses different communication protocols, data formats or operational procedures, India will face a tough choice: to build a second, expensive set of capabilities with China or to persuade China to change its systems to be interoperable with American designs.
Different ecosystems
That is, the U.S.-China competition means India’s increasing embedding in one technological ecosystem will also increase the cost of engaging with the other in future. At the same time, India will be mistaken to avoid deepening ISRO’s relationship with NASA. The U.S.-led ecosystem is much larger and more technologically diverse than the one led by China. But India may nonetheless have to reconsider its strategic autonomy in the spaceflight domain — particularly if the U.S.-China rivalry changes substantially over the next two or three decades. It should certainly steer clear of any dependencies that could hold back its own space programme because of U.S. objections.
In fact, one useful way to achieve this that also presents yet another opportunity for Indian leadership in space is to push for open international standards that allow nations to retain sovereign control over specific hardware and software components without hampering collaborations in space. Such diplomacy could foster interoperability between the lunar blocs and allow India to retain its strategic autonomy.
If it does not, the Moon may cease to be a foreign world but India may find itself a foreigner there.
Published – August 16, 2026 03:00 am IST
