Lunar Outsourcing

In the fast developing friendly atmosphere of co-operation between the world's oldest and largest democracies, as the US and India like to call themseves, a new collaborative frontier has opened up. According to an agreement signed between NASA and the Indian Space Agency, the Indian unmanned mission to the moon in 2008 will include carrying US lunar mapping instruments. The mutually beneficial deal will cut cost for the US in trasporting scientific payload to outerspace and the Indian endeavor will gain from the technical and strategic input from NASA.

"American outsourcing to India is approaching a new frontier: outer space.

Indian and U.S. space agencies signed an agreement Tuesday in India's high-tech hub of Bangalore to fly two American lunar mapping instruments on India's unmanned mission to orbit the moon, scheduled for 2008.

Since sending a U.S. spacecraft to the moon again remains a possibility only in the distant future, NASA is taking advantage of India's more immediate, lower-cost plans for space exploration.

The joint space venture also is part of the Bush administration's effort to forge a close strategic partnership with India, which includes a proposed deal on civilian nuclear cooperation that is awaiting approval by Congress."

Comments

[manoj]

In the 1960s, the US helped India to set up a sounding rocket launch station in Thumba in Kerala.I also remember from my schooldays an observatory set up at Manora, near Nainital, that was used to track the early US satellites. Ford Aerospace made the first two series of multipurpose INSAT satellites. Indian Americans have played a significant role in the US space programme since the 1960s, I have met a prominent businessman, an IIT Bombay graduate, who began life in the US in the '60s, as an engineer working on the attitude control systems of satellites. But all collaboration ceased after the US began to chant the non-proliferation mantra. Strategic interests are now persuading the US to relook their old laws, and there is also an awareness that where others have not hesitated to proliferate nuclear and rocket technologies, India has been very strict on this issue. Indeed, the non-proliferation ayatollahs in Washington DC (an Indian name for American specialists who take a fundamentalist approach to non-proliferation) have been trying desperately to discover instances of Indian bad behaviour. And they have yet to come up with any.

[Ruchira Paul]

Thanks Manoj, for the historical and political background of Indian space research and the US role in it. Let us hope the Indian lunar mission in 2008 is a success.

It is very beneficial when an informed journalist reads one's blog !