Washington: Calling for ramping up collaboration in space exploration, including on long-duration human spaceflight missions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump hailed 2025 as a “pioneering year for US-India civil space cooperation.”
The two leaders, who also launched the INDUS Innovation bridge, held wide-ranging talks on Thursday (Friday IST) focussing on broadening the bilateral partnership, including in the fields of defence, energy, space, and critical technology.
Modi and Trump called for “more collaboration in space exploration, including on long-duration human spaceflight missions, spaceflight safety and sharing of expertise and professional exchanges in emerging areas, including planetary protection,” according to a joint statement issued after the discussions.
“As a central pillar of the TRUST initiative,” the joint statement said, “the leaders committed to work with US and Indian private industry to put forward a US-India Roadmap on Accelerating AI Infrastructure by the end of the year, identifying constraints to financing, building, powering, and connecting large-scale US-origin AI infrastructure in India with milestones and future actions.”
It also said that the leaders announced the launch of “INDUS Innovation, a new innovation bridge modelled after the successful INDUS-X platform, that will advance US-India industry and academic partnerships and foster investments in space, energy, and other emerging technologies to maintain US and India leadership in innovation and to meet the needs of the 21st century.”
The leaders also committed to “build trusted and resilient supply chains, including for semiconductors, critical minerals, advanced materials and pharmaceuticals.”
The leaders also plan to encourage public and private investments to expand Indian manufacturing capacity, including in the US, for active pharmaceutical ingredients for critical medicines. “These investments will create good jobs, diversify vital supply chains, and reduce the risk of life-saving drug shortages in both the United States and India,” it said, alluding to the Chinese supply chain disruption during the COVID pandemic.
They also launched the Strategic Mineral Recovery initiative – a new US-India cooperative program to recover and process critical minerals (including lithium, cobalt, and rare earths) from heavy industries like aluminium, coal mining and oil and gas.
The two sides also signed a pact on a new partnership between the US National Science Foundation and the Indian Anusandhan National Research Foundation in researching critical and emerging technologies.
The joint statement also said that the leaders hailed “2025 as a pioneering year for US-India civil space cooperation, with plans for a NASA-ISRO effort through AXIOM to bring the first Indian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS)” and early launch of the joint NISAR mission, a first of its kind to systematically map changes to the Earth’s surface using dual radars.
“The leaders called for more collaboration in space exploration, including on long duration human spaceflight missions, spaceflight safety and sharing of expertise and professional exchanges in emerging areas, including planetary protection,” it said.
