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Indian government's Department of Space is currently working majorly with nations like Russia, the US, France, Japan and Israel in the domain of space science and technology.   

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This is in line with the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) efforts towards pursuing cooperation with space agencies of other nations, by carrying out joint missions, sharing expertise in applications of space technology, organising International events in India, etc.   

Till date, India has signed space cooperation documents with agencies of 60 countries and five multinational bodies, revealed the Department of Space Annual Report for 2021-22.   

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Listing out the major areas of cooperation between ISRO and foreign space agencies, the report talks about NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, for which ISRO shipped the S-band SAR payload and other hardware's to NASA's JPL for conducting various joint S-band & L-band payload integration tests.   

With regard to Russia, four Indian astronaut candidates as part of the Gaganyaan, which is India's Human Spaceflight Programme, successfully completed the general astronaut training at Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Russia.   

As a new initiative under India-Russia space cooperation, ISRO and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have started exploring cooperation in space research.  

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French Space Agency CNES and ISRO are taking their ties beyond Earth observation and working in the areas of Human Spaceflight and Space Situational Awareness (SSA - the tracking of space debris and orbital objects). In addition to this, there are also deliberations over establishing an ISRO ground station in French Guyana.   

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ISRO and Japanese Space Agency JAXA are working together in the fields of lunar exploration, satellite navigation and Earth observation. The two agencies are specifically working on completing the phase-A study of the Indo-Japan Lunar polar exploration (LUPEX) mission; finalising the instruments to be accommodated lander rover, etc.   

ISRO and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working on network and operations support for Indian missions, such as Chandrayaan-3, Aditya L1, etc.  

"As part of India-Australia space cooperation, discussions are progressing towards establishing ISRO's transportable ground station at Australia's Cocos-Keeling island (CKI) for Gaganyaan mission. ISRO and Israel Space Agency (ISA) have a kick-off meeting for cooperation in flying ISA's Electric Propulsion System (EPS) in ISRO's small satellite," the report added.  

The Indian Space agency's launch and mission schedules were badly hit during the pandemic years 2020 and 2021 and the accumulated backlog continues. This has meant that work is still underway on multiple high-profile missions, such as Chandrayaan-3 (Lunar exploration via Lander and Rover), Gaganyaan (Human Spaceflight to Low Earth Orbit) and Aditya L1 (spacecraft mission to probe the sun).   

While it was initially said that Chandrayaan-3 and Gaganyaan (maiden unmanned flight) could take place in 2022, recent announcements in the Indian Parliament indicate that they might happen only in 2023 and beyond.

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