US ambassador tells Bengaluru that NASA wants India on the Moon base

U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor told the opening of the Bengaluru Space Expo on 7 September that NASA has invited ISRO to join its Moon base programme. “We are going back to the Moon and we want India by our side on the lunar surface,” he said. India has already set a public target of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2040 and of raising its satellite count from 56 to as many as 300 in seven years.

Gor used a phrase he wanted repeated. The relationship, he said, has moved from cooperation to “co-creation.” He pointed to the ninth U.S.-India Civil Space Joint Working Group, held in Bengaluru a few weeks earlier. “We are no longer just sharing data; we are co-designing instruments, co-funding startups, and co-authoring the future of human discovery.” The United States, he said, brings private capital and a mature commercial market. India brings engineering, scientific staff and a startup sector that is no longer asking permission to build rockets.

He named four companies: Pixxel, GalaxEye, Skyroot and AgniKul Cosmos. Pixxel closed a $100 million Series C the same morning, the largest single round yet for an Indian space-tech firm, led by Temasek and Seraphim. Gor’s list was therefore not abstract. One of the names on it had just taken Singaporean and British money on the same day the ambassador asked those firms to look at the American market.

The expo itself runs from 7 to 9 September at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. CII organised it with ISRO, IN-SPACe and NewSpace India Limited. The theme is space for global progress: policy, industry and growth. Gor announced an expansion of the U.S. Commercial Service in Bengaluru to connect American firms with Indian builders, and pointed to the TRUST Fellowship, which puts researchers from both countries in the same programme.

He also placed space inside the wider ledger. Bilateral trade, he said, now exceeds $240 billion, with work in pharmaceuticals, technology and defence running alongside the space file. That number is a political fact in both capitals. It does not by itself put an Indian habitat on a lunar surface. The Moon-base invitation is the sentence that will be briefed to the Prime Minister’s Office and to ISRO’s human-spaceflight centre.

ISRO has spent the past week answering its own unions about private manufacturing of launch vehicles. The agency says it is not being sold. The ambassador’s list of startups is the other half of that argument. New Delhi wants private plants. Washington wants those plants as partners, not only as vendors. Co-design of instruments is the test. If an Indian sensor flies on an American platform, or the reverse, Gor’s phrase will have a serial number. If the week ends with speeches and a trade-booth map, it will not.

India already flies with the United States on civil science. NISAR, the joint radar satellite, is the current exhibit. A Moon base is a different class of promise. It requires money over decades, a legal frame for a surface site, and a political relationship that survives elections in both countries. Gor made the invitation in a hall full of vendors who sell hardware this year. The people who would have to fund a base were not all in the room.

What Bengaluru heard on Monday is still useful. NASA has said, through the ambassador, that it wants ISRO on the lunar programme. Four Indian firms were named in the same breath as American capital. Pixxel’s round gave the speech a same-day receipt. The rest is work for IN-SPACe, NSIL and whoever writes the next joint statement after the working group.