The meeting was attended by US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor and ISRO Chairman V Narayanan, who discussed existing and future avenues of collaboration in the space sector. The US Embassy shared a press release on the meeting on Wednesday. The discussions referenced 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. 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, highlighting recent successes including the Axiom-4 Mission, which sent Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station, and the NISAR satellite, described as the first 50-50 space collaboration between ISRO and NASA.
The Moon Base programme is a two-phased initiative aimed at expanding lunar architecture, robotic missions and human missions to the Moon over the next decade. It was officially launched by NASA in March 2026, though preparations have been ongoing since the first Artemis mission launched in November 2022. NASA states that it wants to establish a sustained presence near the lunar South Pole, an area first accessed by India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2023. The South Pole is significant because of water ice in permanently shadowed regions, its scientific value and potentially useful lunar resources.
NASA has already begun working with private space companies, including Blue Origin, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost, Firefly Aerospace, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, on the landers, rovers and other infrastructure the programme will require. 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.
NASA now wants India to be one of its partners as it looks to steadily expand human presence on the Moon, and eventually on Mars. The invitation deepens the lunar exploration partnership established under the Artemis Accords and builds on the joint work already demonstrated through the Axiom-4 mission and NISAR.
The India-US Civil Space Joint Working Group discussed future avenues of collaboration, and the invitation to join the Moon Base programme now sits with ISRO as the agency considers its role in NASA’s plans for sustained lunar and eventual Mars exploration.
