In the talks between Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and visiting US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns that concluded last Friday, there was little progress on implementing the historic nuclear deal signed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush last July.

But the DoS is smiling away. The Saran-Burns talks have tied up an understanding on letting Indian rockets launch satellites with American components. The move is expected to boost India's commercial rocket launch programme.

ISRO sources told The Indian Express that they were on the verge of finalising an agreement with NASA to launch US instruments on future Indian space missions.

The agreement will initially see a US moon mineralogy mapper (M cube) and a synthetic aperture radar on the Chandrayan 1 moon probe, the 525-kilogram Indian spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2007 or 2008, the sources said.

The Indo-US joint working group on civil space co-operation is expected to meet in Washington this year to finalise agreements on joint satellite activities.

"All India-US space cooperation activities are happening within the framework of the agreement signed by the Prime Minister during his visit to the US," said ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair.

Unlike the DAE, where the political leadership ignored the importance of separating its civilian and military programmes, the DoS from the very beginning was kept separate from the military space programme that was nurtured under the DRDO.

Until recently, the US, citing non-proliferation concerns, had barred the launch of any satellite with American parts on Indian rockets. In a globalising space industry, this severely inhibited many potential users from lining up in Bangalore.

Facilitating this change has been the decision by the DoS to sign a technical safeguards agreement which offers assurance to the US that no technology gleaned from the launch of American satellites would be transferred to the Indian military space programme.

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