New Delhi: NASA has formally invited India to join its Moon Base programme, which aims to establish a sustained human presence near the lunar South Pole. The invitation was extended during the ninth meeting of the India-US Civil Space Joint Working Group, which concluded recently in New Delhi.
The US Embassy on Wednesday shared a press release on the meeting, which was attended by US Ambassador to India H E Sergio Gor and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman V Narayanan. The meeting discussed existing and future avenues of collaboration between India and the US in the space sector.
The meeting also mentioned the TRUST Initiative, launched jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump in February 2025 to deepen US-India cooperation in critical and emerging technologies, explicitly including space, alongside AI, semiconductors, quantum, biotechnology and energy.
Narayanan was joined by M Sankaran, Director of the UR Rao Satellite Centre, while Gor was joined by Wesley Brooks, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, and Kathleen Karika, NASA Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations.
They discussed both civil and commercial space collaboration between the two countries, highlighting recent successes such as the Axiom-4 Mission, which sent Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station, and the NISAR satellite, which was the first 50-50 space collaboration between ISRO and NASA.
What is NASA’s Moon Base programme?
The Moon Base programme is one of NASA’s most ambitious, two-phased programmes, which aims to expand lunar architecture, lunar robotic missions and human missions to the Moon over the next decade.
It was officially launched by NASA in March 2026; however, preparations for the programme have been ongoing since the first Artemis mission launched in November 2022. While the Artemis programme is focused on returning humans to the Moon through a series of lunar missions, the Moon Base programme is more ambitious than that.
NASA’s website explains that it wants to establish a sustained presence near the lunar South Pole, an area that was first accessed by India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2023.
Moreover, the agency has already begun working with private space companies, including Blue Origin, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost, Firefly Aerospace, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, in preparation for the different landers, rovers and other infrastructure that will be required for the programme.
The South Pole of the Moon is important because of water ice in permanently shadowed regions, its scientific value and potentially useful lunar resources.
As a signatory of the Artemis Accords in 2023, India agreed to cooperate with NASA on lunar exploration, technological support, emergency assistance and the public sharing of scientific data.
The Axiom-4 mission and NISAR have been results of this cooperation, and now NASA wants India to be one of its partners as it looks to steadily expand human presence on the Moon, and eventually on Mars.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)