“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

“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

In this image released by ISRO on August 30, 2023, Vikram Lander is seen on the surface of the Moon as captured by the Navigation Camera (NavCam) onboard Pragyan Rover. File
| Photo Credit: PTI

India aims to send an astronaut to the moon by 2040, the government said on October 17, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued instructions to the space department that include plans for a space station by 2035.

India’s space ambitions got a boost when it became the first country to land a spacecraft near the unexplored south pole of the moon in August, just days after a similar Russian mission failed, and the fourth overall to achieve a soft landing.

Also Read | Hundreds of tests planned, working to get crew module from outside India: ISRO’s Somanath on Gaganyaan

After that success, India launched a rocket to study the sun and is scheduled to conduct a test later this week as part of its crewed space mission.

“Prime minister directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals, including setting up ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) by 2035 and sending first Indian to the moon by 2040,” the government said in a statement.

“To realise this vision, the Department of Space will develop a roadmap for moon exploration,” it added.

Mr. Modi has also called on scientists to work on missions to Venus and Mars.

New Delhi:

India aims to send an astronaut to the moon by 2040, the government said on Tuesday, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued instructions to the space department that include plans for a space station by 2035.

India’s space ambitions got a boost when it became the first country to land a spacecraft near the unexplored south pole of the moon in August, just days after a similar Russian mission failed, and the fourth overall to achieve a soft landing.

After that success, India launched a rocket to study the sun and is scheduled conduct a test later this week as part of its crewed space mission.

“Prime minister directed that India should now aim for new and ambitious goals, including setting up ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) by 2035 and sending first Indian to the moon by 2040,” the government said in a statement.

“To realize this vision, the Department of Space will develop a roadmap for moon exploration,” it added.

PM Modi has also called on scientists to work on missions to Venus and Mars.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A 3D image of the Vikram lander. ISRO created the image by using the anaglyph technique. Anaglyph is a simple visualization of the object or terrain in three dimensions from stereo or multi-view images. Photo: X/@isro via PTI

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is looking to awaken the Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover as dawn will be breaking on the moon on September 22.

The lander and the rover went to sleep after the end of one lunar day (14 earth days).

On September 2, the Pragyan was put in sleep mode and two days later on September 4, the space agency put Vikram too in sleep mode with its payloads switched off. Both the Vikram’s and Pragyan’s receivers however have been kept on.

Now, on September 22, with sunlight back on the moon, ISRO is hoping that their solar panel would get charged and that it could establish contact with the two.

Also Read | What helped Vikram lander to soft-land on the moon 

Once the sun sets on the moon after the completion of one lunar day, temperature could plunge below minus 200°C.

“The temperature there goes down to -200 degrees [Celcius]. In such an environment, there is no guarantee that the battery, electronics will survive, but we did some tests and we get the feeling that they will survive even in such harsh conditions,” Mr. Somnath had said earlier.

Since their landing on the moon on August 23, Vikram and Pragyan have carried out many in-situ measurements like confirmation of the presence of Sulphur in the region, and detecting the presence of minor elements, among others.

Vikram also achieved a significant milestone as it successfully undertook a hop experiment when the lander on command fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm, and landed safely at a distance of 30–40 cm away.

Also Read | Chandrayaan-3 | Vikram hops on the Moon and lands safely

This successful hop experiment and kickstart could have significant bearing on the future missions which are launched with an objective to bring back samples from the moon and also future human missions to the moon.

If ISRO manages to wake up Vikram and Pragyan it would be a bonus for the space agency as it would be hoping to carry out some more experiments on the moon.

The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was launched on July 14 and touched down on the lunar surface on August 23, making India the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, and the first nation to touch down on the polar region of the moon.

The indigenous rover’s exploration of the lunar surface began a day after India became the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, spurring euphoric celebrations at ISRO and around the country. Photo: ISRO

Hours after the Pragyan lunar rover rolled out from the Vikram lander and took its first “walk on the moon” in the early hours of Thursday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said that the historic Chandrayaan-3 Mission was running on schedule, with all systems working normally. Instruments aboard the lander and rover will now study the moon’s mineral composition and the seismic activities in its atmosphere, according to ISRO chairman S. Somanath.

The indigenous rover’s exploration of the lunar surface began a day after India became the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, spurring euphoric celebrations at ISRO and around the country.

‘Walk on the moon’

“Chandrayaan-3 ROVER: Made in India Made for the MOON! The Ch-3 Rover ramped down from the Lander and India took a walk on the moon!” ISRO posted on social media platform X, on Thursday morning.

President Draupadi Murmu had made the first announcement of the rover’s successful deployment at 7 a.m. “Its rolling out a few hours after the landing of Vikram marked the success of yet another stage of Chandrayan 3. I look forward with excitement, alongside my fellow citizens and scientists to the information and analyses that Pragyan will acquire and enrich our understanding of the moon,” she posted.

‘All systems are normal’

Later in the evening, ISRO added an update on mission operations and the payloads aboard the lander. “Chandrayaan-3 Mission: All activities are on schedule. All systems are normal. Lander Module payloads ILSA, RAMBHA and ChaSTE are turned ON today. Rover mobility operations have commenced. SHAPE payload on the Propulsion Module was turned ON on Sunday,” it posted.

Dr. Somanath confirmed that the rover movement is happening and working very well. He told the Press Trust of India that there are two instruments in the rover and three instruments on board the lander, and all of them have been switched on sequentially.

“They will study basically the mineral composition of the moon, as well as the atmosphere of the Moon and the seismic activities there,” he added.

‘Perfect landing’

Dr. Somanath also said that the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s lander Vikram had touched down on the moon’s surface well within the area identified for the purpose.

“(The lander landed) perfectly in the intended site. The landing location was marked as 4.5 km x 2.5 km — I think on that space, and the exact centre of that was identified as the location of landing. It landed within 300 metres of that point. That means it is well within the area identified for landing,” he said.

(with PTI inputs)

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Search engine giant Google on August 24 celebrated India’s success in its third Moon mission Chandrayaan-3 with a special animated doodle.

India scripted history on August 23 with its touchdown on the lunar south pole, making it the first nation to land on the uncharted surface.

With this achievement, India was propelled into an exclusive club of four, becoming the fourth country after the U.S., China and the erstwhile Soviet Union to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon.

Lauding this historic feat, the Internet behemoth has come up with a doodle “celebrating the first landing on the moon’s south pole!”.

The graphically dynamic doodle depicts letters of ‘GOOGLE’ floating in outer space amid twinkling stars, with an animated ‘moon’ forming the second ‘O’ in the sequence. It also shows a spacecraft making a soft landing on the moon’s south pole.

“Today’s doodle celebrates the first-ever landing on the moon’s south pole! The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota Range, Andhra Pradesh, India on July 14, 2023 and successfully touched down near the lunar south pole region on August 23, 2023,” read the note on Thursday’s Google Doodle.

“Moon landings are no easy feat. Previously, only the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union have completed soft landings on the moon — but no country has made it to the southern pole region before now,” it added.

In an epic moment for India as it joined the elite club in the space sector, the nation on Wednesday erupted in celebrations to hail the country’s historic achievement.

Comprising the lander (Vikram) and the rover (Pragyan), the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 touched down on the lunar south pole at 6.04 pm.

“The moon’s south pole has been an area of heightened interest for space explorers as they suspected the existence of ice deposits located inside permanently shadowed craters. Chandrayaan-3 has now confirmed this prediction to be true! This ice offers the potential of critical resources for future astronauts such as air, water, and even hydrogen rocket fuel,” added the Google note with the doodle.

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