Moscow and New Delhi are talking about mixed crews, shared orbits and navigation stations while India’s own NavIC constellation sits below the minimum needed for standalone positioning. The timing is not accidental. Putin is in Delhi for BRICS. Washington is still pressing India on trade and oil. The question is not whether the two sides like each other. It is what, exactly, they can build before the International Space Station is gone.
Source: Video Screenshot
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
The political clock: On 11 September 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin reviewed space alongside trade, energy and defence on the sidelines of India’s BRICS chairmanship, according to Indian and Russian official briefings carried by Business Today and Reuters. Space is being treated as a pillar, not a footnote.
The engineering claim: First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov said Russia and India are considering cross-flights with mixed crews to future national orbital stations, with possible joint experiments later. That line, published by RT India on the same day, sits on top of an earlier decision to park both stations near the familiar 51.6-degree inclination used by the ISS.
The Indian weak point: Parliament was told in July 2026 that NavIC cannot provide standalone positioning because only three satellites are transmitting position signals. Timing still works. A fourth satellite is required for a basic fix. NVS-03 has been described as launch-ready.
The Russian weak point: Rassvet, Moscow’s low-Earth-orbit answer to Starlink, has launched two batches of production satellites in 2026. Independent trackers report early failures, delayed orbit-raising and a gap of thousands of spacecraft versus SpaceX. It is a programme in motion, not a finished network.
The wider implication: Navigation and connectivity in orbit now sit inside the same argument as tariffs, oil, two-front war planning and BRICS data-sharing. Civilian science and military utility travel together whether diplomats like the wording or not.
The newest fact on the calendar
The newest hard news is dated 11 September 2026. Modi and Putin met in New Delhi ahead of the 18th BRICS Summit and, in the Indian readout, reviewed cooperation across political, economic, defence, energy and space files. The same day, Union minister Jitendra Singh told a BRICS dialogue in the capital that India has “no problem joining any collaboration” in space and technology, including the proposed BRICS remote-sensing constellation. That is the public layer. Beneath it sits a quieter technical file: ground stations for GLONASS and NavIC, talk of engine work, and the idea that two national stations might one day swap crews. Source.
Readers who want the multipolar framing that Indian policy voices have used this year can start with Planet Today’s earlier report on Samir Saran’s argument that no single superpower will dominate for a generation. The space story is one working example of that bet.
What the original argument actually said
The piece that triggered this review, published by RT India on 11 September 2026 and written by Aaryaman Nijhawan, makes a simple claim with a long tail. Space is expensive, brittle and prestige-heavy. The big three remain Russia, the United States and China. India sits in the next ring. Because the bill is so high, partners matter.
Manturov, speaking in the run-up to Putin’s Delhi visit, floated mixed crews on future national stations. Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval visited a Roscosmos industry centre in May. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar co-chaired the 27th session of the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission in Moscow in August. Those meetings are real. The interpretation RT wraps around them is the part that needs daylight.
Nijhawan places the space file against three backdrops: a United States that, in his telling, is tearing up the old order with tariffs; the wars in Ukraine and Iran; and the rise of drones and precision munitions that live or die by satellite timing and connectivity. He argues that American pressure has revived older Indian memories of Cold War friction, and that closer work with Russia — and a cautious thaw with China — is New Delhi’s way of answering Washington. He also argues that joint production and ground stations let Russia park some sensitive work beyond Ukrainian reach, and that India, planning for a two-front contingency, has an interest in any guidance and communications layer that still functions when GPS is jammed or denied.
That is the thesis. It is not a secret briefing. It is an argument. The rest of this article tests the moving parts.
Mass media and the other newsroom
What mainstream Western and Indian business desks emphasise
Reuters, Bloomberg and Indian business papers covering the same 11 September meetings put space on a list, not on a pedestal. The lead is trade: a $100 billion bilateral target by 2030, oil still flowing despite U.S. pressure, talk of a bilateral investment treaty, delayed S-400 deliveries, rare earths, small modular reactors. Space appears as one more inherited file from the Soviet-era relationship — Gaganyaan training, engines, navigation — now being refreshed because the ISS has an end date and because both capitals want options.
Western analysis of India-U.S. ties in 2025–26 has been blunt. Trump-era tariffs, including penalties tied to Russian oil, strained a partnership that the Biden years had advertised as a defining 21st-century alignment. Carnegie and Indian think tanks describe New Delhi doing what it always does under pressure: multi-align. Keep the Quad and the defence exercises. Keep cheap crude and legacy platforms from Moscow. Talk to Beijing when a BRICS summit is on the calendar. Doval’s August trip to Beijing for border talks belongs in the same week as the space file, not in a separate universe.
On the American side of the sky, the story is not a closed door. In early September the U.S. ambassador in India publicly invited New Delhi onto NASA’s lunar-base track after a presidential social-media post that read “The Moon Is Ours.” NISAR, the NASA-ISRO radar satellite, remains the largest bilateral civil space project the two countries have flown. That is the competing offer: fly with us to the Moon, map Earth with us, do not treat Moscow as the only workshop.
Scientific American and Ars Technica, looking at Russia’s station plans in late 2025, were cooler still. They noted that Moscow dropped a high-latitude polar orbit for the cheaper, familiar 51.6-degree plane of the ISS. Roscosmos officials cited future work with India. Independent Russian specialists told Scientific American the India line was a convenient extra reason for a decision driven by money, existing hardware and the wish to reuse the Russian ISS segment rather than invent a polar architecture from scratch. Both things can be true: India is a useful partner, and Russia is conserving cash.
What Russian state media and aligned commentary emphasise
RT, TASS and allied Indian-language commentary stress continuity and insult. The United States, in this telling, sanctions friends, prices energy as a weapon, and discovered India only when China grew large. Russia never left. Mixed crews, shared ground stations and a post-ISS station become proof that a multipolar sky is already being built. BRICS remote-sensing talks are presented as the civilian face of the same turn.
Readers should treat that frame the way they treat a Pentagon presser: as a national argument with facts inside it, not as a court verdict. RT is financed by the Russian state. That does not automatically make every date or name false. It does mean the adjectives are doing political work.
Stations after the ISS: what is signed, what is hoped
The International Space Station is scheduled to come down around 2030. China already flies Tiangong. The United States is pushing commercial stations. Russia has spent years drawing a Russian Orbital Station. India has approved a Bharatiya Antariksh Station, with a first module discussed for 2028 on a future heavy launcher.
The concrete bilateral move that can be dated is orbital geometry. During Putin’s December 2025 visit to New Delhi, officials on both sides talked about placing ROS and BAS on a shared 51.6-degree inclination. Shared inclination is not romance. It is fuel. Changing planes in orbit is expensive. If two stations live in the same plane, crew and cargo vehicles can, in principle, visit both without burning a fortune. Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov has said the same plane could even leave a door open to American platforms later. That sentence is worth sitting with. It is not a closed anti-Western bloc. It is an attempt to keep the old ISS neighbourhood inhabited after the building is condemned.
Cross-flights with mixed crews are a step beyond geometry. They need compatible docking, compatible life support, compatible medical standards, and political trust that survives the next crisis. India has already sent pilots to the Yuri Gagarin centre for Gaganyaan. Russia has sold know-how on suits, escape systems and crew modules. That history is real. A routine exchange of station crews in the 2030s is still a plan, not a flight manifesto.
Engine talk belongs here too. Indian reporting through late 2025 described possible work on semi-cryogenic propulsion and even language about technology transfer on RD-191-class hardware. Those sentences should be read as negotiations, not as delivered crates. Space engines are among the most tightly held industrial assets a country owns. Announcements thicken before metal does.
Navigation: NavIC’s hole, GLONASS’s offer
If stations are the prestige layer, navigation is the daily layer. Phones, trains, ships, aircraft approaches and a long list of military systems all ask the same question: where am I, and what time is it?
India built NavIC so that answer would not depend only on GPS. The design was a regional constellation of seven satellites, covering India and about 1,500 kilometres beyond, with a civilian signal and a restricted military signal. Atomic clocks are the heart of the system. When clocks die, the constellation shrinks.
In a written Lok Sabha reply on 29 July 2026, Minister of State for Space Jitendra Singh said only three satellites — IRNSS-1B, IRNSS-1I and NVS-01 — were still providing positioning, navigation and timing services after IRNSS-1F reached the end of its mission life. Four satellites are the minimum for a standalone position fix. Timing still functions. The government also said users are not blind because receivers now sit in a multi-constellation world: GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and whatever NavIC still offers. The armed forces, the minister added, use that mix as well. NVS-03 was described as ready; NVS-04 and NVS-05 were in advanced stages. Those are official words, not a blogger’s panic. India Today and Business Standard carried the same parliamentary record.
This is why mutual ground stations matter. In late 2025 the Russian ambassador in Delhi, Denis Alipov, said work was under way on “mutual parity placement” of ground stations for GLONASS and NavIC so each system could collect measurements on the other’s territory. More ground truth usually means better clocks, better orbits, better accuracy. It is the least glamorous and most practical piece of the file. It is also dual-use by nature. A better civilian fix is a better military fix.
India is not waiting only on Moscow. Eutelsat’s work with Tata’s Nelco, Starlink’s renewed push for Indian licences, Viasat’s multi-orbit pitch, and Reliance’s planned low-Earth-orbit broadband fleet are all in the same market. NavIC’s gap makes those offers louder. It does not make any one of them inevitable.
For a sense of how commercial Earth-observation constellations are being sold as both civil tools and watchtowers, see Planet Today’s recent explainer on Satellogic’s Merlin satellites and the surveillance debate around them.
Rassvet and the connectivity war that already happened
The RT essay leans hard on a lesson from Ukraine. In the opening days of the full-scale war, attacks on commercial satellite infrastructure disrupted Ukrainian links. Starlink filled the hole fast enough that command networks did not collapse. Since then, cheap drones, glide kits and cruise missiles have made satellite timing and satellite communications look less like luxuries and more like ammunition.
Russia’s public answer is Rassvet, built by Bureau 1440 with state money and sold as a domestic stand-in for Starlink. Two production batches went up in March and July 2026, on the order of 32 spacecraft, toward early targets often cited around 250–300 satellites by 2027 and several hundred more in the 2030s. That is the brochure.
The tracking record is messier. Ars Technica, Anatoly Zak’s RussianSpaceWeb work, and Ukrainian technical accounts through September 2026 describe satellites released lower than the planned operating altitude, slow plasma-engine climbs, at least one confirmed re-entry, and a handful of birds that never manoeuvred. Some later analysis argued the second batch was raising orbit faster than the first and that early “failure” calls were premature. Both readings can sit on the same table: the programme exists, it is launching, and it is nowhere near the density that makes Starlink useful in a jammed war zone day after day.
Putin’s occasional claim that Russia “now operates” a Starlink-class system should be read against the satellite count, not the other way around. Fifteen or thirty working spacecraft can open brief connectivity windows. They do not yet replace a mature mega-constellation.
The original RT article lists Russian munitions and drones that gain accuracy from GPS, GLONASS and, in future, a working Rassvet-class layer. That list is public knowledge and has been for years. The strategic point is narrower and does not require a manual. Modern long-range fires and unmanned systems are hungry for time and position. Countries that cannot guarantee either will rent it, steal it, or do without. India’s planning staffs have written for years about a two-front problem. A second source of timing is insurance. It is not a magic shield.
The same logic cuts the other way. If New Delhi leans too far into a Russian communications layer, Washington will treat that as a security problem inside the Quad. If it leans only on American constellations, Moscow will treat that as proof the “special and privileged strategic partnership” is a slogan. Multi-alignment is easy in communiqués. It is hard in radio frequencies.
Defence industry sitting under the launch tower
Space cooperation does not float above the arms trade. India still flies a large Russian-origin fleet. Additional S-400 units have been cleared even while U.S. lawmakers write bills that would punish large buyers of Russian oil and gas. At the same time, New Delhi has approved large indigenous packages — missiles, counter-drone gear, high-altitude unmanned aircraft — precisely to widen the supplier base. Planet Today covered one of those packages here: India’s $5.46 billion equipment clearance.
Co-production of engines and the parking of component work in India is, from Moscow’s side, also a sanctions story. Ukrainian industry once sat inside Soviet supply chains. War ended that. India offers workshops, engineers and political distance from European export controls. From New Delhi’s side, the same sentence is about Atmanirbhar rhetoric meeting a supplier that will still transfer know-how the United States often will not. Neither capital is doing charity.
The Ukraine war has already reached Indian civilians at sea. Four Indian seafarers died when a grain ship was hit near Odesa in July 2026. That is not a space story, but it is a reminder that “strategic autonomy” has a body count when great-power wars close shipping lanes. The report is here: MV Golden Leo.
BRICS: data first, uniforms later
The RT essay ends in the right place and then overreaches. Space work between Moscow and New Delhi does not have to stay bilateral. In August 2021 the original BRICS space agencies signed a remote-sensing data-sharing agreement. In May 2022 they stood up a joint committee. Under India’s 2026 chairmanship, heads of space agencies met in Bengaluru in June and talked about amending the constellation agreement for new members, debris, disaster response and a proposed BRICS Space Council first floated by Brazil. CGTN, ISRO and Indian ministers have all put those talks on the record. Singh’s 11 September remark that India will join space-tech collaborations sits on that track.
What the public documents describe is a virtual constellation: countries keep their own satellites and share images for floods, crops, climate and search-and-rescue. That is useful and politically cheap. It is not the same thing as a shared military navigation grid or a joint targeting network. The RT piece itself admits the military step “remains to be seen.” That caution should be left in the text. A BRICS Space Economy is a slogan until there is a procurement line and a frequency plan.
BRICS is also a trade bloc with a grievance list. The same grouping spent August attacking Europe’s carbon border tax as discriminatory. Space data and steel tariffs live in one diplomatic season. See BRICS and the EU carbon levy.
Washington’s shadow, without the sermon
Nijhawan writes that the current U.S. administration has “upended” decades of policy by hitting allies with tariffs and sanctions, that India has been struck more than once, and that failed deal-making with Trump has left Indian public opinion newly suspicious. Parts of that are measurable. Tariff spikes in 2025–26, including oil-linked penalties, were real. Indian commentary did revive older stories about American tilt during the Cold War. Other parts are mood. India never forgot Washington; it hedged. The U.S. never became a selfless mentor; it became a useful heavyweight against China.
The honest ledger looks like this. The United States remains India’s most important technology and capital partner in the commercial space market, the source of the heaviest foreign payloads India launches, and the co-owner of NISAR. Russia remains the memory bank of human spaceflight training and a supplier willing to discuss engines and stations without a democracy lecture. China is the neighbour India both needs inside BRICS and watches on the LAC. None of those sentences cancel the others.
When American officials say they want India “by our side” on the Moon the week after a presidential graphic plants a flag on lunar dust, they are making a political offer dressed as exploration. When Russian officials say mixed crews will fly to national stations, they are making a political offer dressed as engineering. Readers can accept both invitations, reject both, or price them.
What can be said with a straight face
First, the relationship is thickening in the files that cost money: ground stations, training, station orbits, industrial exhibitions such as Innoprom India, and a trade target that both sides repeat because the current basket is still too narrow and too oil-heavy.
Second, India’s navigation independence is incomplete. That is not an insult to ISRO. It is the parliamentary record. Until NVS-03 and its follow-ons fly and stay healthy, NavIC is a timing service plus a contributor to multi-GNSS receivers. Anyone selling India a low-orbit network — French, American, Indian private, or Russian — is talking to a buyer with a gap.
Third, Russia’s low-orbit connectivity project is early. Treating Rassvet as a finished wartime internet is advertising. Treating it as a serious attempt to stop living on Starlink’s mercy is fair.
Fourth, mixed crews on two national stations after 2030 are plausible only if both programmes survive budgets, sanctions, launcher delays and domestic politics. Shared inclination is the cheap first step. Shared life-support certification is the expensive second step.
Fifth, low-orbit constellations will keep rearranging both commerce and conflict. That sentence does not require a camp. Ukraine already demonstrated it. Commercial imaging firms are selling daily remaps of Earth. Navies and border forces will buy what works. The Russia-India channel is one of several workshops, not the only one.
The curiosity that remains
The interesting question is not whether Delhi and Moscow will issue another memorandum. They will. The interesting question is which layer moves first: the civilian data-sharing BRICS already knows how to do, the navigation ground stations that quietly improve both GLONASS and NavIC, or the crew-exchange theatre that photographs well and flies late.
A second question sits behind that. If the United States keeps using tariffs as a loyalty test, does India buy more Russian insurance in orbit, or does it accelerate private Indian constellations so that neither superpower owns the signal over the subcontinent? Reliance’s planned fleet and the Tata-Eutelsat track are the domestic answers. They will be judged by launch cadence, not by summit language.
A third question is Chinese. New Delhi can share flood maps with Beijing inside BRICS and still treat Chinese dual-use constellations as a military problem. Russia cannot wish that split away. Every joint station conversation will be read in Beijing as either an opening or a snub.
How to read the week without picking a jersey
Putin in Delhi during a BRICS summit is theatre with a budget. Manturov talking mixed crews is a signal that the post-ISS years will not be left to NASA contractors and Tiangong by default. Singh saying India will join space collaborations is a reminder that New Delhi wants the largest possible menu. U.S. diplomats talking about a Moon base with ISRO is the competing menu.
None of that requires a reader to believe that America is dismantling the world, or that Russia is building a gentle scientific commune, or that India has solved autonomy by signing one more protocol. The cheaper reading is older and duller. Great powers share the sky when the bill is high and hoard it when the signal can steer a weapon. India is trying to stay on more than one invoice. Russia is trying to stay relevant after losing the Ukrainian industrial belt and watching Starlink rewrite a war. The United States is trying to keep India out of a closed Eurasian tech stack without paying India’s full political price.
Watch the next NavIC launch. Watch whether Rassvet satellites reach and hold their working altitude. Watch whether a docking standard for ROS and BAS is published rather than promised. Those three events will tell you more than any toast in Bharat Mandapam.
For related Planet Today reporting on the same season of alignment and friction, see China-Russia naval drills, Western air-defence aid to Ukraine, and the economics of a world that no longer assumes one referee: trust, gold and official numbers.
Sources worth keeping open
- RT India, Aaryaman Nijhawan, “India and Russia are building something big in space,” 11 September 2026 — the essay under review: https://www.rt.com/india/645467-russia-india-space-partnership/
- Business Today / Indian official briefings on the 11 September 2026 Modi-Putin review of space, defence, energy and trade.
- Lok Sabha reply by Jitendra Singh, July 2026, on NavIC’s three operational PNT satellites.
- Economic Times / TASS via Ambassador Denis Alipov on mutual GLONASS-NavIC ground stations.
- ISRO and PIB notes on the June 2026 BRICS Heads of Space Agencies meeting in Bengaluru.
- Scientific American and Ars Technica on Russia’s 51.6-degree station decision and Rassvet’s early on-orbit record.
- Reuters and Bloomberg on tariffs, oil and the India-U.S.-Russia triangle in 2026.
Original source: Aaryaman Nijhawan, “India and Russia are building something big in space,” RT India, published 11 September 2026, 11:44, updated 12:45. Full URL: https://www.rt.com/india/645467-russia-india-space-partnership/
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: RT is a Russian state-funded international outlet. European regulators and many Western governments treat it as a propaganda channel. Russian officials, in turn, treat leading American and European papers as instruments of NATO policy. Both charges contain a method and an exaggeration. In this case the dated meetings (Manturov, Doval, Jaishankar, Modi-Putin), the NavIC parliamentary record, the GLONASS-NavIC ground-station talks, the 51.6-degree station discussion, and the existence of a Rassvet programme can be checked in non-RT sources. The causal story — that U.S. tariffs “caused” a space bloc, or that mixed crews are already a military fact — is interpretation. Readers should separate the calendar from the sermon, whichever capital wrote the sermon.