NASA invites ISRO onto its Moon base programme, U.S. ambassador tells Bengaluru

U.S. ambassador Sergio Gor told the opening of Bengaluru Space Expo 2026 on 7 September that NASA has formally invited the Indian Space Research Organisation to join its Moon base programme. "Make no mistake: we're going back to the Moon, and we want India by our side on the lunar surface," he said.

The ninth edition of the expo runs from 7 to 9 September at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. It is organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry with ISRO, IN-SPACe and NewSpace India Limited. Gor met ISRO chairman V. Narayanan on the sidelines to discuss human spaceflight.

India is a signatory of the Artemis Accords. Gor framed the next phase as co-creation rather than cooperation: joint instrument design, shared funding of startups, docking standards, interoperability and astronaut training. He pointed to the Axiom-4 mission and five joint science investigations as the base already built. He said the NISAR Earth-observation satellite had shown that shared hardware can feed disaster work on the ground.

He named Indian firms he wants in the American market: Pixxel, GalaxEye, Digantara, Bellatrix, Skyroot and Agnikul. "The American market is open to you. Our investors are watching you," he said. Pixxel closed a 100 million dollar Series C the same week, the largest space-tech round recorded in India, taking its total capital to 195 million dollars.

India's stated targets sit behind the invitation. The country plans to grow its operational satellite fleet from 56 to as many as 300 over seven years and to land Indian astronauts on the Moon by 2040. Those dates only work if docking hardware, training pipelines and launch cadence exist. An invitation into a U.S. Moon base is one way to borrow that stack. It is also a way for Washington to put Indian mass and engineering on a programme that still has to fund habitats, power and cargo after Artemis crew flights.

Gor's language was salesmanship and policy at once. "When the United States and India work together, we do not just practice addition; we practice multiplication," he said. "From Bengaluru, let us look upwards." What the invitation does not yet contain is a workshare, a budget line or a landing site. Those will have to come from NASA programme offices and from ISRO's human spaceflight group, not from an ambassador's lectern.

The practical next documents are docking standard talks, training slots for Indian astronauts, and any memorandum that names the Moon base as a joint task rather than a visiting role. Until those papers exist, 7 September is an announcement that the door is open. The companies Gor listed already sell sensors, launchers and awareness software. They do not yet sell a habitat. That gap is the actual content of the invitation.