Boeing seeks ISRO alliance –opportunities to be explored

Bangalore: Boeing has shown preliminary interest in seeking an alliance with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in the area of communication satellites, but this may impinge on an existing alliance ISRO already has with European aerospace and defence giant EADS. The two entities may, however, explore other opportunities, a senior ISRO official said.

Boeing's approach in this regard intrudes on an existing tie-up ISRO already has in this segment with EADS Astrium, managing director of Antrix Corporation, ISRO's commercial arm, KR Sridhara Murthi said.

"They (Boeing) said they are interested in having collaboration with us in the field of communication satellites. But we already have an alliance with Europeans (EADS Astrium)," Murthi said.

"May be some new areas of business we have to explore. We need to do a lot of homework before we could arrive at collaborative level. Still, it's very preliminary type of exchange," he added.

ISRO, which has an agreement with Astrium to jointly offer communication satellites with a launch mass of two tons to three tons for the international market, is now seeking to expand its alliance.

"We are trying to cooperate in other areas (in addition to communication satellites) such as earth observations. So, we have built along with them (Astrium) some multi-sensor ground systems for the USA and we are also trying to cooperate in other areas and explore what other type of cooperation we can do in the field of earth observations," Murthy said.