Washington, Oct. 22: A press release by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) about the launch of Chandrayaan-1 said it all. “Nasa Returns to the Moon with Instruments on Indian Spacecraft," it said.

America caught the world’s imagination when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but nearly 40 years later it has a space programme that is in crisis. The US is looking to India, in part, for help in tiding over that crisis and to keep its space programme going.

Few people realise that for almost four decades, there have been no comprehensive maps of the moon. Not since the Apollo era that was Nasa’s high point.

Chandrayaan-1 hopes to send back to earth pictures of much higher resolution than Japan’s moon mission, Kaguya or China’s Chang’e-1, both launched in 2007. That Nasa had to turn to India for this tells a story that goes beyond diplomatic homilies about Indo-US collaboration in space.

For this reason alone, space promises to be big frontier of cooperation between India and the US under the next occupant of the White House.

Whether it is Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, the next US president will have to take a quick decision on how much to spend on Nasa’s projects.

The outgoing President, George W Bush has signed a bill that allocates $20.2 billion for Nasa in the next year. But it leaves open a decision on how much of that allocation to actually spend.

That decision will be taken by either Obama or McCain and the incoming US Congress. “The Chandrayaan Lunar Mission means the sky is the limit in terms of the potential for space collaboration between our two countries," Ron Somers, president of the US-India Business Council, told this reporter at a reception last night where invitees watched a live feed from Sriharikota of the moon mission's lift-off.

“The stars are now within reach and the vista of opportunity is vast. This unique technology partnership in civil space exploration, which taps India’s highly skilled scientific expertise with American instrumentation furnished by Raytheon, beckons what we hope will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship promoting the opening of the frontier of outer space,” he added.

Arun Kumar Singh, the new deputy chief of mission at the Indian embassy in Washington, said “American cooperation in India's first unmanned lunar mission marks the beginning of a new era or trust and partnership between the two countries in the field of space science.”

He recalled that India’s first rocket was launched from Thumba in Kerala in 1963 in cooperation with the US.

As Indian scientists in Sriharikota were giving finishing touches for the Chandrayaan-1 launch yesterday, Nasa’s administrator Michael Griffin was pleading with the media in Huntsville, Alabama, to stop criticising the agency on the ground that morale among its engineers designing new rockets was being undermined.

But the media is the least of the problems in US efforts to do things in outer space. Last week, the US Congress cut off funds to the Pentagon to buy and launch two commercial imagery satellites.

Confronted with a budget crunch, the defense appropriations committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives also cancelled all the remaining funds for this year for similar programmes.

But this is where India becomes relevant to the US. Costing just under $80 million, India’s moon mission is the cheapest in the world. It costs much less than Japan's and is even cheaper than China's, space experts here estimate.

With America having less to spend, turning to India for cooperation in space will not be a gesture by the next US president. It may be a dire necessity to keep Nasa going. It may be yet another case of Indians not realising their strength in dealing with the US.