Yesterday NASA and its Indian counterpart, ISRO, formally signed an agreement whereby NASA will contribute two instruments to India’s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1. Sounds good, right? International cooperation in lunar exploration would seem to be a positive development. But, according to the Los Angeles Times, some people are concerned about aspects of the cooperation:
But critics see the multinational mission to explore the moon from an Indian spacecraft as a threat to the long-term U.S. strategy of preventing the spread of nuclear missiles.
India’s first rocket to the moon, called Chandrayaan-1, will be one of its towering, four-stage Polar Space Launch Vehicles, which India has used in the past to launch satellites into Earth’s orbit.
Experts have long warned that the same rocket could also be armed with a nuclear warhead and turned into an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, capable of hitting cities in Europe, China or the U.S.
Richard Speier, an author of the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary agreement among the U.S. and 33 other countries, argues that space cooperation with India weakens that pact.
“I should emphasize that the MTCR, and all of nonproliferation, is a policy of line-drawing,” Speier, a Pentagon nonproliferation specialist from 1982 to 1994, said from Reston, Va. “Weaken or erase the line and you weaken or erase the efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”
This seems like a weak argument in this case. The PSLV is not a new launch vehicle: it has been in service since the early 1990s, although typically performing only one or two launches a year. NASA’s contribution to the Chandrayaan-1 mission has nothing to do with the launch vehicle: it involves scientific instruments that will be flown on the spacecraft. Moreover, India had already committed to this mission long before signing yesterday’s agreement (also on the spacecraft are three instruments from ESA and one from Bulgaria), and had received more proposals for instruments than it had room on the spacecraft to accommodate them.
In short, it’s hard to see how this agreement either enabled this mission or would allow missile-related technology transfer. There may be legitimate concerns about sharing missile technology with India, but that does not necessarily mean that the US should avoid any kind of space cooperation with India.
I agree with Jeff. This is rediculous. If Indian launch vehicles are an issue, the cat is long since out of the bag. Since they are a democracy, we have no business attempting to deny Indian asperations in space even if we could; we should be treating them more-or-less as an equal, like we do Britain or Canada.
— Donald
It is a dumb claim to make and the writer demonstrates his ignorance of the issues. I like the claim that the Indians could build missiles to reach the United States. But isn’t India an ally? Yes. So why is that a worry?
However, the mission does raise an interesting question (well, interesting to me, anyway): one of the NASA instruments to be carried on the Indian spacecraft is a mini-SAR radar ostensibly designed with the assistance and cooperation of the National Reconnaissance Office. So how do they get around ITAR restrictions? This is a satellite technology with military applications.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1524484.cms
“…If NASA and ISRO can work together the former could outsource future projects to the latter. ”
LOL, this rhymes with the sentiment I’ve heard from the Indians I’ve worked with. The only draw to the “mutually beneficial cooperation with the US” for India is, and I quote: “to get more of the US outsourcing pie” , well that, and the technologies that they pay nothing for in terms of research time or expense. Great deal for the US taxpayer!
My main thesis is that the US (first and foremost, the taxpayer such as me for example) is being taken for a ride left and right, as the politicos search desperately for ‘allies’ all over the globe (Did you see how the latest row over the Yuan dumping with the commie China ended? The US gubment took it up the a…)