Boeing climbing into bed with India (ISRO)

Boeing has evinced interest in collaborating with Indian Space Research Organisation in the area of communication satellites, and the two entities are exploring joint opportunities, a senior ISRO official said.

But the future possible cooperation with Boeing is unlikely in the field of joint-building of communication satellites as the Indian Space agency already has a tieup in this segment with EADS Astrium, Managing Director of Antrix Corporation, ISRO's commercial arm, K. R. Sridhara Murthi indicated.

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

"May be some new areas of business we (ISRO and Boeing) 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," Mr. Murthi said.

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

"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," he said.