Moon Base | India’s lunar future

NASA has invited ISRO to participate in its latest lunar programme, which seeks to build a human outpost near the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight is available for longer periods and permanently shadowed craters contain significant deposits of water ice

Published - August 16, 2026 03:00 am IST

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, with acting Associate Administrator Lori Glaze and Moon Base Program Executive Carlos Garcia-Galan, holds a news conference on updated plans for the agency’s Moon Base initiative for a long-term lunar presence, at NASA headquarters in Washington DC on May 26, 2026. | Photo Credit: REUTERS

“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.

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.