Amid Space Race 2.0, US-India discuss details of sending first Indian astronaut to International Space Station in 2024

In a follow-up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first state visit to the US in June this year, the US has reiterated its commitment to send the first Indian astronaut to the iconic International Space Station (ISS) later this year.

The matter was discussed in some detail at the meeting of Prime Minister Modi with US President Joe Biden ahead of the weekend’s G20 Summit, a joint statement released by the two sides has said.

During their Friday parleys, the two leaders discussed the pathway toward new frontiers across all sectors of space cooperation. They also welcomed efforts being made towards the establishment of a working group for commercial space collaboration under the existing India-US Civil Space Joint Working Group.

“Determined to deepen our partnership in outer space exploration, ISRO and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have commenced discussions on modalities, capacity building, and training for mounting a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024 and are continuing efforts to finalise a strategic framework for human space flight cooperation by the end of 2023,” the statement read.

Launched in November 1998, the ISS is one of the two modular space stations located in the Lower Earth Orbit (LEO), the other being China’s Tiangong Space Station (TSS). Taking ten years and more than 30 missions to assemble, the ISS is a result of cutting-edge scientific and engineering collaboration among five space agencies representing 15 countries. The size of a football field, the 460-tonne crewed platform orbits more than 400 km above Earth.

By far, 271 persons from 21 countries have visited ISS. A visit by an Indian astronaut would make the person the second Indian citizen to go to space after Rakesh Sharma’s visit to the erstwhile USSR’s Salyut 7 orbital station in 1984.

Space Race 2.0

President Biden also congratulated scientists and engineers of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Chandrayaan-3’s historic landing at the south polar region of the Moon, as well as the successful launch of India’s first solar mission, Aditya-L1.

A surprise agreement inked during Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to the US was India becoming the 27th signatory to the non-binding Artemis Accords, a multilateral agreement between the US and other countries to return humans to the moon by 2025.

“As a global space community, we have been trying to formulate some shared perspectives on space exploration, how it should be accomplished, and who should benefit. The Artemis Accords were one of the first recent efforts to advance the original principles laid out almost 50 years ago and are set up to be building blocks,” Elizebeth Varghese, People in Space-Leader at Deloitte and author of the best-seller Stellar Singularity: Navigating the Spacefaring Economy, had told Business Today earlier.

According to Varghese, a lot more work is required to navigate the new landscape of space exploration. 

Among other things, this newly emerging landscape consists of an intensification of the space race that had almost ended with the USSR’s collapse in 1991.

Following the rapid strides made by China in space exploration by successfully sending its own taikonauts into space, constructing a crewed space station and probes to the Moon and Mars, the world’s largest economy is looking to regain ground lost in interplanetary research since the abandonment of the Apollo manned missions to the Moon in 1970.

In India and ISRO, a low-cost yet one of the most successful space agencies globally, the US sees a natural partner to again emerge as the winner in Space Race 2.0.

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