Mumbai:

US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti has said America will send an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station by the end of this year.

The NISAR project, a joint Earth-observing mission between US space agency NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is also likely to be launched by the end of the year, Garcetti said on Wednesday.

“We are going to put an Indian astronaut into the International Space Station this year,” he said. “We promised when PM (Narendra) Modi came (to the US in 2023) that by the end of this year, we will do this and our mission is still on track to be able to go in space this year,” he said.

The US ambassador was speaking on the sidelines of an event to mark the 248th Independence Day of the United States.

He said both India and the US should look at coordinating research and critical emerging technology so that they can increasingly leverage each other’s strengths.

The diplomat said India landed ‘Chandrayaan 3’ on the Moon last year at a fraction of the cost that the US incurred on a similar lunar mission.

“The US has some capacities that India still doesn’t have today. When the two are combined, both countries have those capacities,” he said.

On the civilian nuclear energy arena, Garcetti said after elections, the Indian government can address outstanding liability issues and move forward “arm in arm and hand in hand”.

Two sites in India – Mithi Virdhi in Gujarat and Kovadda in Andhra Pradesh – have been earmarked for US companies to build nuclear reactors.

However, the companies have raised concerns over the Civil Liability Nuclear Damage Act 2010, which provides for prompt compensation to the victims for damage caused by a nuclear incident through a no-fault liability regime. 

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

A file photo of Chandrayaan-3 Project Director P. Veeramuthuvel.
| Photo Credit: Moorthy. G

India’s ambitious plans to have its own space station by 2035 and have an Indian astronaut on the moon by 2040 are progressing on track, P Veeramuthuvel, Project Director of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, said on February 10.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi and ISRO Chairman have already said that by 2040 we should have an Indian astronaut on the moon and also to have our space station by 2035. These are very ambitious plans that ISRO has taken up and we are working towards that,” he told PTI in Udhagamandalam .

On ISRO’s success in bringing back the Propulsion Module (PM) of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft to Earth’s orbit, Mr. Veeramuthuvel said, “as far as Chandrayaan-3 is concerned, the lander and rover mission successfully completed one lunar day.”

“We successfully completed the hop on experiment wherein we used the same engine where we landed and again we operated the payload for one earth day,” he added.

The propulsion module which was supposed to orbit around the moon met all the mission objectives successfully. “We brought the propulsion module back to earth’s orbit because we got some propellent available in the propulsion module and demonstrated (our capability) by successfully bringing it from moon’s orbit to earth’s orbit,” he said.