Much of the media attention devoted to President Bush’s trip to India has been about the nuclear technology agreement between the US and India. However, the joint statement by Bush and Indian PM Manmohan Singh also includes a couple of bullet points about space:
Agreed to continue exploring further cooperation in civil space, including areas such as space exploration, satellite navigation, and earth science. The United States and India committed to move forward with agreements that will permit the launch of U.S. satellites and satellites containing U.S. components by Indian space launch vehicles, opening up new opportunities for commercial space cooperation between the two countries.
Welcomed the inclusion of two U.S. instruments in the Indian lunar mission Chandrayaan-1. They noted that memoranda of understanding to be signed by ISRO and NASA would be significant steps forward in this area.
Neither development is that surprising, particularly the latter, given that both NASA and ISRO have been talking for over a year about flying those instruments on India’s first lunar mission, which is also carrying several ESA instruments. There had also been a lot of discussion about the former item, although it’s not clear if the agreements that the two countries agreed to “move forward” on were supposed to be completed before the visit or not.
Speaking of India, earlier this week the country’s Ministry of Finance issued its planned fiscal year 2006-7 budget, including a detailed discussion of ISRO’s planned budget. (For the uninitiated, a crore is equal to 10 million, and at current exchange rates there are about 44 rupees in 1 US dollar.) ISRO would get about $825 million in the 2006 budget, a significant increase over 2005, although the revised 2005 budget cut about $100 million from the original 2005 budget proposal for the agency.
