This week brings the news that an US radar that launched into space aboard an Indian spacecraft has detected craters filled with ice on the moon.

Behind the innovation and bleeding edge headlines must lie a lot of seemingly mundane collaboration between technologists in India and USA.

By that, I mean: NASA does not wake up one day and decide to call up Bangalore to say that they want to piggyback NASA’s satellite on India’s lunar space craft. There have to be a number of commercial agreements, IP sharing and interoperability. Also, there will be some standards but a lot of issues will be new due to the very nature of the innovation. Often, solutions will be found by the engineers working together. Also, there cannot be very many ‘standards’ since this kind of collaboration is cutting edge. Nor can there be too much government intervention except at a broad/strategic level.

Which brings us to the question of: What is the motivation for collaboration in this case? It is simply pragmatism, innovation and solving specific problems.

Nor is it confined to India and USA. In the past, China, Europe and Russia have also collaborated with the USA on specific space related issues.

Much of this kind of collaboration goes un-noticed and has limited standards governing it, but as we can see, it drives very significant innovation