There’s a particular kind of compliment that sounds better than it really is. “You should join us”. It is, undoubtedly, better than being left out. It means someone thinks you have something to contribute. But there’s a world of difference between being invited into somebody else’s project and being one of the people deciding what the project should become.That distinction matters for India now.Nasa has invited Isro to join its Moon Base programme, opening a new avenue for cooperation in lunar exploration and human spaceflight. The invitation came during the latest meeting of the India-US Civil Space Joint Working Group in Bengaluru, building on the relationship between the two countries under the Artemis Accords.
Parallax is the apparent shift of an object when viewed from different positions
It is a significant invitation. India should take it seriously. But it should also make Bengaluru [Isro headquarters] and New Delhi ask a larger question: Is India content to be a partner in the next chapter of space, or does it want to help write the chapter?For decades, India has been very good at partnership. Chandrayaan-1 carried international instruments. Nasa and Isro built Nisar together. India has worked with France, Japan, the US and others across science and Earth observation. These collaborations have brought expertise, instruments, data and opportunities that neither side could have created as efficiently alone.But India’s own lunar history makes the distinction more interesting. Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, helped establish that the Moon was not the dry, inert world it was once assumed to be. Its instruments, including one from Nasa, detected signatures of water, while subsequent analysis pointed to water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole.Water suddenly became more than a scientific curiosity: it could mean life support, oxygen and potentially rocket fuel. India, in other words, did not simply arrive after the Moon became strategically interesting again. Chandrayaan-1 helped make it interesting again. Yet discovering something and having a say in what happens because of that discovery are two different kinds of power.There’s nothing wrong with being a partner. In fact, modern space exploration may make partnership indispensable. The problem begins when partnership becomes a permanent description of ambition. Because something fundamental is changing above us.The Moon is no longer simply a destination to visit. It’s becoming a domain in which countries and companies will establish infrastructure, collect data, develop technologies, negotiate operating practices and eventually compete for economic opportunity. Nasa’s Artemis programme, for instance, envisages a sustained human presence around and on the Moon, including the Gateway lunar space station and surface systems.China and its partners are pursuing a different pathway through the International Lunar Research Station. India sits between these emerging systems, having signed the Artemis Accords in 2023 while developing its own increasingly ambitious lunar and human-spaceflight capabilities.These aren’t merely programmes to which India can choose to send a payload. They are beginning to look like architectures. And architectures have owners, designers and rule-makers.That’s where India’s ambition needs to change. India has spent decades celebrating the ability to do more with less. Chandrayaan-3 became the perfect expression of that philosophy: a difficult mission accomplished at a comparatively modest cost. It was an extraordinary achievement.But the next phase of space will demand something different. You cannot build a sustained presence around the Moon with a succession of brilliant one-off missions. You need launch capacity, spacecraft, communications, navigation, robotics, life-support systems, docking and servicing technologies, private companies, money and, above all, continuity.You need to be able to stay. And if you can stay, you acquire something more valuable than a photograph or a landing record. You acquire influence.Consider what is already being discussed around lunar exploration: standards for operating alongside other spacecraft, sharing scientific data, protecting sites of historical importance, managing space debris and determining how activities can be conducted without interfering with one another. The Artemis Accords themselves are an attempt to establish principles around many of these issues.India cannot afford merely to implement rules written elsewhere. It needs the capacity to help write them. This isn’t an argument for turning space into another arena for chest-thumping nationalism. Quite the opposite. India will need partners. Lots of them. But there will be a difference between strategic partnership and strategic dependence.A country that can contribute only a useful instrument will be valuable. A country that can contribute an instrument, a launch vehicle, a scientific capability, a commercial ecosystem, a landing system or a piece of lunar infrastructure will have more leverage.And a country that can bring several of those together gets to ask a different question: What should we build together? That’s the question India should increasingly be asking. The invitation to Isro is therefore more than an opportunity to join a Moon Base programme. It’s a test of where India sees itself in the emerging space order.India has already proved that we can reach the Moon. The next challenge is harder. It has to become one of the countries whose absence would make the conversation incomplete. That’s what a seat at the high table means.Not being invited in. Being impossible to leave out.PostscriptThere is something particularly appropriate about this argument appearing in Parallax. Parallax is about what changes when the vantage point changes. For years, we have looked at India’s space programme largely through the lens of achievement: Did India launch? Did India land? Did India succeed? Those are important questions. But perhaps it is time to ask a different one. Did India help decide what came next?
