APOGEE STAFF
The door is opening wider on collaboration in space defense between India and the United States, pushed in part by a host of projects in the civil realm that include global navigation satellites, space situational awareness, human space exploration and policies for commercial space.
A working group on civil space dates to 2005, but developments in the past three years have accelerated the partnership and raised prospects for even closer ties between two nations with so much in common — as democracies and major space powers. For one thing, the U.S.-India Civil Space Joint Working Group has added “planetary defense” as a topic. What’s more, space is at the center of two far-ranging, defense-related technology deals: the U.S.-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, or iCET, and the India-U.S. Defense Accelerator Ecosystem, known as INDUS-X.
“The U.S. could certainly serve as a model for India, as it has in the past for Europe,” David Logsdon, senior director of the Washington, D.C.-based industry group the Space Enterprise Council, told Apogee. “Each country’s strategic space vision is closely aligned with the other.”
The U.S., as well, has much to gain from closer ties in space. High-tech firms worldwide have long sought to tap India’s prolific technology workforce, and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has developed into a model of speed and efficiency, culminating in the landing in August 2024 of the Chandrayaan-3 lunar exploration mission. “They’ve done, as the world has seen, a spectacular job on limited resources,” said Zaheer Ali, a professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management and an expert on space technology and policy.
Prospects for greater cooperation in space also advanced with India’s signing in April 2022 of an information-sharing space situational agreement with the U.S., and in June 2023, of the U.S.-led Artemis accords, a common vision of space exploration for the benefit of all humankind. The accords, now backed by nearly 50 nations, highlight a contrast to the pattern of behavior exhibited by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), whose aggressive moves across realms have drawn concern from India and the U.S. Both nations kick-started their space defense programs in response to the PRC’s testing of an anti-satellite missile in January 2007 that created a massive debris field in busy low Earth orbit (LEO). The debris posed immediate danger to the crew of the International Space Station and will remain a threat to other spacecraft for years to come.
Today, India keeps an eye on PRC space capabilities, including work by its commercial sector on Earth observation satellites, said Namrata Goswami, a professor of space security with the U.S. Space Force Schriever & West Space Scholars Program at Johns Hopkins University. Competition for dominance in the developing world and a history of violent border clashes has created tension between the two nations, fueling India’s concerns about PRC advancements. “They may be able to map an area at 30 centimeters, instead of 1 meter, which really makes a difference in space situational awareness, in terms of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR),” Goswami told Apogee. That’s a level of resolution that matches the most advanced U.S. commercial satellites. “India doesn’t have that capability,” she said.
Better ISR would help India achieve its goal of better threat assessment in the Indo-Pacific region and globally to better predict, for example, an escalation in conflict, Goswami said. One lesson India and other nations have learned from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that intelligence failed despite satellite coverage. “Nobody could predict the Hamas attack in real time,” she said. “That’s something India is totally worried about because of its own conflict borders with China and Pakistan. That’s where to look for in terms of, ‘Can we improve that kind of capability?’”
Other areas of focus for India are space logistics, such as on-orbit refueling and maneuvering. India, like the U.S. and PRC, also is starting to build its own space plane, and with a nudge from the government, the nation is developing a more robust commercial space sector and looking for ways to regulate it. India, in other words, has growing and specific needs as it develops its space capabilities, Goswami said. “Low Earth orbit satellites, communication, navigation, ISR, targeting — India is a nuclear state, so missile verification, safety, secure command and control. All of that. Then I would argue about geosynchronous orbit. India is looking for specific point location, for example — mapping of its conflict areas,” Goswami said.
Possible collaboration areas
India might welcome collaboration with the U.S. in all these areas of need, Goswami said. First steps are being taken through iCET and INDUS-X, including cooperation between the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) commercial accelerator, the Defense Innovation Unit, and the Indian agency known as IDEX, or Innovation for Defence Excellence. More interaction is needed, Goswami said, with DOD agencies that are developing new technology — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for example, and the Air Force and Space Force innovation arms known as AFWERX and SPACEWERX.
“We have all these joint statements, we have visits by high-level dignitaries,” she said. “What is really missing is much more institutional, very focused interoperability, if I may use the word. Especially in the military domain.” Of particular importance, she said, is interaction among personnel across ranks and ratings. Logsdon with the Space Enterprise Council, who co-wrote a September 2024 article for Space News titled, “The expanding opportunity for Indian-U.S. space cooperation,” also pointed out the work of the Space Force’s Space Development Agency, calling it a “model organization on how to acquire commercial solutions in an agile fashion. Many of the agency commercial space policies are unclassified, publicly available, and could be replicated by the government of India.” Military leaders worldwide are turning to the innovation and flexibility of their commercial sectors for satellites capable of such “dual use.”
First, though, certain barriers to the sharing of high-end technology must be eased, Goswami said. Among the U.S. rules governing such exchanges are the Export Administration Regulations, International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Missile Technology Control Regime, known by the acronyms EAR, ITR and MTCR. “I would not use the word waiver, but something that anticipates India is a partner when it comes to, say, building collaborative technology in space,” she said. “ITR is a one-size-fits-all document and I think we need to think about how this is actually not benefiting when it comes to the kind of institutional collaboration I’m talking about. So, can we think up a legal framework where, with bipartisan support, the U.S. can actually enable Indian defense companies to have much greater collaboration? Right now, that doesn’t exist.”
Another area where India could benefit from U.S. collaboration — with its defense personnel, commercial players and academia — is in the operations expertise that comes from war-gaming, Goswami said. In February 2024, India was one of three observer nations attending Global Sentinel, an annual exercise conducted by U.S. Space Command to grow international partnerships, improve operational collaboration and promote responsible behavior in space. In 2025, India will rise to participant status, the White House announced in June 2024. Twenty-five nations attended as participants in 2024.
Space and technology wind through the series of agreements and joint statements announced during the past two years by political, defense and diplomatic leaders from India and the U.S. These moves reflect an easing of tensions that had lingered from Cold War associations and India’s testing of a nuclear weapon in 1998, Goswami said. The gradual improvement in relations dates to a presidential visit in 2000. Still, “It’s only starting to get better now.” India had declared itself nonaligned after emerging from nearly two centuries of British colonial rule during the post-World War II era and helped create the global group of nonaligned nations. It remains true that India has no formal defense alliances, no treaty with another nation, as do the nations of NATO, for example, which pledge that an attack on one is an attack on all. But unlike earlier administrations, which showed a “deep distrust” of the United States, India’s leaders today “don’t like the word nonalignment,” Goswami said. “They like strategic alignments, based on national interests.”
Trust can help grow the relationship, said Ali with the Thunderbird School, whose family is from India. The U.S. has backed India’s stalled bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, for example, and works with India, Japan and Australia as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, on keeping the Indo-Pacific free from the kind of territorial aggression shown by the PRC. And underlying all agreements between the two nations is the U.S.-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership. Still, India deserves membership in other world bodies, such as the Group of Eight intergovernmental political forum, Ali said. “There needs to be a treatment of India as more of an equal partner, much more like the way we treat the European powers,” he said. This is especially true in space, where some of the closest U.S. allies are JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and DLR, the German aerospace agency. “If you think about the way we work with JAXA or DLR, those are models that would be great to emerge because those are very close relationships but sufficiently carefully maintained.”
“Nonaligned is antiquated”
For all these reasons, Ali sees “a bit of a standoffishness” by India “that, really, we need to pull down. There are so many points of alignment.” Among his examples: The two nations have suffered from deadly jihadist attacks; the U.S., with assimilation as its “superpower,” is a main destination for the modern Indian diaspora; and both nations struggle with the market disruption that comes from an onslaught of Chinese goods. “So, this image of India as nonaligned is antiquated. If you were to do a stakeholder map like a businessperson of what people believe, how they act, you’d very clearly see U.S., U.K. [United Kingdom], Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany — and India, over here. Democratic. Freedom of speech is always at scale, but free press, people’s rights. So, in that way, they’re very aligned.”
Both nations stand to benefit substantially by working more closely together in space, he said. “You can imagine alignments possibly on things like commercial LEO destinations, in-time commercial space stations, not just on the military side. You can imagine collaboration on in-space manufacturing and things like that. You can imagine additional alignments and intercourse in an academic sense. Not just on the technical side, but on the management side.”
Trust is an issue, too, when it comes to safeguarding exchanges of high-end technology, so they don’t end up in the hands of an adversary. Indian companies were among some 400 sanctioned by U.S. agencies in October 2024 after providing prohibited technology to Russia — including computer, aircraft and electronic components — for possible use in its war against Ukraine. Among the Indian firms was pharmaceutical company Shreya Life Sciences Private Ltd., which has sent hundreds of shipments of U.S.-trademarked technology to Russia valued in the tens of millions of dollars since 2023, the Treasury Department said. “The recommendation I would have is that India’s Ministry of Defence and Department of Space need to come up with very restrictive regulatory fines,” Goswami said, “anything to ensure that this does not happen. That kind of reassurance will have to be given to the U.S. so that technology does not transfer to Russia.”
Most of the U.S. sanctions were aimed at the PRC, pointing up the tense relationships among these three major space powers. The PRC, with its growing economy and space achievements, has pulled closer to Russia, once India’s space patron, while India is working more closely with the U.S. as it sees Russia’s space program decline. Still, India, like the PRC, remains a major trade partner of Russia, bucking U.S. calls for embargoes across markets over the Ukraine invasion. The main reason, said Goswami, who is from northwest India, is that the nation cannot produce enough oil on its own. “India has not said what China said, that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. India has criticized the invasion of another sovereign nation, called for withdrawal and peace. NASA is still collaborating with ISRO. The oil situation is such a tragedy.” Still, she said, with its Russian trade, including its reliance on Russian military equipment, India may be putting relations with the U.S. at risk: “The deeper collaboration that India seeks might not get there because of this particular situation.”
India has succeeded so far in balancing its relations with the U.S. and Russia, Ali said, in part because it seems that “Russia is ceding the field” when it comes to space. In the same week that 70 million Indians watched the Chandrayaan lunar landing on YouTube and a cheer went up nationwide, a Russian mission to the moon failed. “That blown-up lander on the moon was their last hurrah,” Ali said. “They’ve done nothing since then, they don’t have the money to do anything. They’ve hemorrhaged talent, their facilities are crumbling because they haven’t maintained them. It’s not like they couldn’t have maintained them.” Another sign of the times: India is switching its astronaut training from Russia to the U.S. Ali added, “Even as Russia pursues a war of aggression, I think there’s a realization that its people are being brainwashed. We just don’t understand that. It’s hard for us to wrap our brains around it.” In many ways, he said, as a space power, “India’s play is to replace them.”
Guiding the developing world
The world’s most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people, India has also been trying to position itself as leader of the developing world, Ali said, “something that they want to take away from China.” The chief vehicle for PRC outreach is its decade-old One Belt, One Road initiative, an investment that could reach $8 trillion across Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, and whose top beneficiary so far has been India’s neighbor and adversary Pakistan. Since the 1950s, India and the PRC have competed for this leadership role and feuded over shared borders, culminating in a Chinese invasion in 1962 — on the heels, as many Indians see it, of a PRC declaration of brotherhood between the two nations known as “Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai.” “Because of the duplicitousness exhibited by the Chinese Communist Party, there’s a massive distrust that will last for generations and generations,” Ali said. At the same time, India is moving to raise its own population out of poverty, in part through investment in high-end technology and the jobs it creates. Today, each Indian contributes an average of about $8,000 a year to the national economy, compared to the $35,000 each Malaysian contributes to their economy, Goswami told the Ex Terra Podcast in September 2023. The ISRO expects to increase its budget 20% to 30% in the coming years, and the government anticipates India’s share of the commercial space market will grow from $8 billion to $44 billion in the next decade.
If the U.S. plays its cards right, Goswami said, India’s global outreach can create opportunities. “India is coming as a counterweight to China, talking about billions in investment, educating African youth in Indian universities. What the U.S. can actually do is not to see this as a strategic challenge to U.S. leadership but to see how it can actually play a collaborative role with India in building these capabilities.” India was able to get to the moon for just $73 million, she noted. “That’s a program to emulate, including its satellite-building capability. The U.S. should take advantage of that. Think about the world in 2040. India is going to have the largest skilled population between the ages of 25 and 40 in science and STEM. That can also be used as an advantage in engagement with the developing world.” The NASA International Space Apps Challenge, drawing more than a quarter-million mostly younger registrants each year, already attracts more participation from India and Egypt than from the U.S. In addition, this demographic shift in India may provide new markets for U.S. companies as their home customer base shrinks with age, Ali said.
Understanding history, culture and motivations will help foster cooperation at all levels between India and the U.S., the experts agree. “What India is refusing is to be a client state,” Ali said. India studies the U.S. defense system very deeply, Goswami said, including the doctrine that’s written to clarify national goals in civil, commercial and military space. She suggested involvement at early stages in the development of space capabilities and moving beyond a strictly transactional relationship. “If you approach your Indian counterpart, and you go with a complete set of ideas, they don’t like that,” she said. “I don’t have to go to India and say, ‘OK, this is where we collaborate,’ right? Just get a sense from India’s own assessment, ‘What are your top five priorities in terms of defense capability? What is it that you’re looking for?’”
Also of importance is how India’s standing as an often-underrated world power, situated in a global crossroads, has shaped its outlook, Ali said. It is unlikely, as a result, that India would try to avoid duplication and save money by relying on another nation for any space defense capability — a strategy suggested by space interests, including Logsdon of the Space Enterprise Council. “India is known as a global leader in downstream space capabilities, such as Earth observation,” he said. “The government should continue to invest in these capabilities while relying on other partner nations for other capabilities.” Ali, instead, used a carrot and stick analogy, noting that India has seen many a carrot offered and withdrawn. “My instinct is that they’re going to pursue sovereign capabilities aggressively, across the board,” he said. “I think part of this is they have the ability to be truly continental with their reach. So, when you look at all of this stacking up, I would say, if you’re India, ‘I have clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle with you.’ If I’m India, I need my own stick.”