Last year in September, NASA announced the Artemis Accords, which is an international agreement that aims to bring together countries to conduct operations on the Moon responsibly. The signatories to the Accords will be a part of Artemis Program led by the US.
Artemis Program aims to land two astronauts on the moon, the first time after 1972, by 2024; all to establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the end of the decade. These goals are courageous, but will need international cooperation and private sector support.
The number of participants in the programme has increased to 12 after New Zealand and South Korea signed the accord recently. The eight founding members – Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, UAE, UK, and the USA – have been joined by Brazil, and Ukraine as well.
Signatories have agreed to conduct all space activities in peace and to follow relevant international law. They are also committed to maintain the transparency of in the flow of information regarding their policies, exploration plans, and data sharing from resulting activities. Thought the accord, the participants also aim to render aid whenever needed to the best their abilities, and make hardware & software ‘interoperable’ to maximize cooperative use.
Concerns
The Artemis Accords, although, has been criticised on the account that it is a-bit-too-much US-centric in its application and implementation. This has been a primary concern of Russian diplomats and other critics, who argues that the program which a country can only participate in, after signing the accord held by the US, effectively makes the US the de-facto gatekeeper of the moon and other planetary bodies of the solar systems.
The world's two most robust space agencies, China and Russia, are not part of this accord. China because of NASA’s inability to collaborate with it after the US Congress banned any such possibility in 2011, and Russia which had previously exclaimed their concerns about the US dominance in the accord.
The Kremlin also said that the accord’s principles were not in line with international cooperation, linking it to Trump’s executive orders to colonise space. While China did not officially respond to the accord, CNSA’s (China National Space Administration) Space Law Center Deputy Director, Guoyu Wang argued in an article in The Space Review that the accords cannot be viewed as an extension of the Outer Space Treaty, but are instead an attempt to create norms outside of established international regulatory frameworks.
Effectively a response, On March 9, 2021, the CNSA and Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the joint construction of an autonomous lunar permanent research base. Such collaboration was no surprise to anyone, after the Artemis Accords.
India’s Space Plan and The Artemis Accords
For now the goals of the ISRO do not seem to be aligned with what the Artemis Accords is hoping to achieve. While India hopes to continue their mission to maintain a fleet of earth-observation satellites, it is also aiming to do its first manned mission to outer space.
ISRO is hoping to be on track with the goals, and have opened up its doors towards private space and tech companies. It has started the process of allowing private participation in building and launching its earth-observing satellites. India right now is also in the process of drafting a space law that helps make Indian Space efforts more categorised and concrete, rather than blanket statements.
However, even if the goal of Indian space exploration is distant from what the Artemis sets to achieve, there remain considerable benefits that the ISRO and India can receive in its space race if they do sign the accord.
India is right now trying to sharpen the technological skills of the ISRO with a special focus on R&D, and the accord can undeniably boost such efforts. An early signing to the Artemis Accords can help India gain lessons from other countries that are members of the accord. This could be things like robotics from Canada, sample return and avionics from Japan, and ground station and deep space network expertise from the US and Australia.
Being a part of the accord will also mean that India’s space companies will become a part of a global supply chain, along with India’s SMEs and new space start-ups. Attracting important investment in capital towards the new startups will lead to the flow of capital into India.
In the past as well, India has taken help from western countries like the USA and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s to better understand sounding rockets and satellite technology. This experience can also be similar as the Artemis Accords will definitely provide an important opportunity to learn about the interplanetary mission and human spaceflight. These are the goals in which India has been lagging behind in comparison to other space faring nations. These windows of technological learning can only help.
QUAD Angle
India signing the accord also seems to be the next natural step in geopolitical terms as it becomes a natural extension to the QUAD’s Critical and Emerging Technologies Working Group. Since the US, Japan, and Australia are already signatories to the accord, India’s addition to the Accords would provide a better framework of coordination among the QUAD countries in space which might also translate to other critical developing technology.
USA also has keen eye on India as an important power to hold off the Chinese dominance in Asia, and this accord can also be a natural extension towards strengthening the alliance. India and the US have collaborated in the past with the Chandrayaan-1 and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR).
There are also other signatories with whom India is individually collaborating in terms of its space-related plans. India is collaborating with Japan on a future lunar mission, called LUPEX, to the Moon’s surface. India also depends on Ukraine for semi-cryogenic engines – and Ukraine is a signatory to the Accords. India, for now, does depend on the Russian Space Agency for their human space programme, but there have been multiple nations who are part of the Accord which have offered a hand, like the US, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
India, however, does need to gauge the field with caution. The Artemis Accords may sound very elusive, and with reassuring substance, yet US’s promotion of the accord outside the ‘normal’ channels such as the UN committee for Peaceful Use of Outer Space is a concern.
The Accords, as suggested by many experts, makes its signatory interact through the US – this dynamic that it establishes makes NASA a de-facto coordinator and leader of the group. Asking signatories to sign bilateral agreements incites a fear that the US is applying its own quasi-legal rules. The circumstances of the accord shed a light of doubt on if at all this is an collaborative effort that US is pushing, or just another tactic of grabbing dominance of power of resource mining and exploration by the US and its allies.
The Other Lunar Project
Another alternative to India over the Artemis Accords is the Russian and Chinese collaboration. Russia is an old friend for India, when it comes to space, and even if Indo-Chinese relations in term of geopolitics have not been the best to say the least, both the countries have had few ‘framework’ documents on paper signed in the past about outer space collaborations, which can be a stepping stone towards joining the ‘other Lunar Project’.
A position, which in a way looks back at the Non-Alignment history of India in global politics, is India working as an independent arbitrator and fulfill the need of the “sensible” space power.
Experts like Ajey Lele, a senior fellow at MP-IDSA (Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses), in an article, claims that India can join the China Russian space collaboration as a part of an effective engagement strategy.
It is important to note that US and China have in the past clearly hinted toward the hegemonisation of space resources, and China might be of the more economically well-off and technological savvier of the two. Experts across the fields opine that criticism from the fence might not be the best idea, and only lead to losing out, so even if India as an independent nation of the two blocs, wants to keep a check on it, the best way might just be to join the game.
Even though, Russia has been an old collaborator, India’s relation with China in the current geopolitics is necessarily bad. With the ongoing border dispute in the Himalayas, Chinese efforts to contain India within the Indian Ocean, and the recent activation of the QUAD, where India has been an active particiapant, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that China will allow India to participate in its space programme without forcing or at least nudging India to shift its geopolitical stance.
All said, there has yet been no murmurs from within India on joining either space projects which has brought many to the conclusion that India is still waiting for the ‘right time’, more especially after it has been able to at least initiate its homegrown space projects.