Realisation of the Indo-US nuclear deal will have an indirect beneficial impact on the growth of the Indian space programme as the two nations can explore the frontier challenges in space together, noted space scientist Dr K Kasturirangan has said.
One of the positive outcomes of the deal will be a renewed effort in building a partnership to address the challenges in space technologies, said the former chairman of ISRO. Designing inexpensive vehicles for space faring; setting up a lunar base, co-development and marketing of commercially viable space systems, manned flights and deep space explorations are the areas in which both can work together, he suggested at a FICCI meeting here on Tuesday.
“Though the materials and equipment supplied to some of the ISRO institutions still undergo fairly intense scrutiny, a large number of restrictions imposed in the sanctions were eased. The nuke deal can further bring the industry and scientists closer,” he said.
But at the same time he cautioned that USA still maintains its “entity list” and “look at it from time to time”. However, the number of companies on the list, says FICCI secretary general Amit Mitra, has come down to four from 240 in the last eight years. In what may be a symbol of the new found coziness in the bilateral relationship, Chandrayan will carry two US payloads – moon mineralogy mapper made by the Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory and mini synthetic aperture radar developed by the John Hopkins University.
Hinting at the possible creation of a new outfit to look after only manned flights in the future, he  said such an organisation might be necessary due to the enormous amount of resource and technical complexities involved for manned mission.