Expanding satellite-sharing among ISRO, Roscosmos, and CNSA, the summit advanced the BRICS Remote Sensing Constellation and a new Space Council, while reaffirming support for a binding treaty against space weaponization.
Space and Earth-observation cooperation reached its most concrete New Delhi Declaration outcome not through a brand-new programme but through the expansion and formalization of a mechanism BRICS space agencies have been building since 2017: the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation. It is worth being precise about what actually happened at the summit here, because the underlying infrastructure is five years older than some summit coverage suggests. The RSSC began as consultations among Brazil’s AEB, Russia’s Roscosmos, India’s ISRO, and China’s CNSA in 2017, gained South Africa’s SANSA as a fifth partner that same year, and was formalized through an agreement the five original space agencies signed on August 18, 2021, under India’s previous BRICS chairship. The constellation itself is a virtual network built from existing national satellites rather than a jointly built spacecraft fleet — China and Brazil’s jointly developed CBERS-4, Russia’s Kanopus-V series, India’s Resourcesat-2 and 2A, and China’s Gaofen-6 and Ziyuan III 02 — with each agency’s ground stations pooling data for shared use in climate-change research, disaster response, and water-resource management.
What the New Delhi Declaration adds is expansion and institutional deepening rather than creation. The declaration records significant progress finalizing an amendment to the RSSC Agreement that would extend membership to the newer BRICS space-capable states admitted since the original 2021 signing — Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all joined the wider BRICS bloc after that date — and, more significantly for the bloc’s long-term space governance, it records drafting work on the Terms of Reference for a new BRICS Space Council, a body that would sit above the RSSC’s satellite-sharing mechanism and coordinate the bloc’s broader space policy. That drafting work follows directly from a BRICS Heads of Space Agencies meeting held in Bengaluru in June, where officials also discussed space-debris mitigation as a shared priority for the constellation’s long-term sustainability — a sign that BRICS space cooperation is moving from bilateral data-sharing toward genuine multilateral governance, even if the Space Council itself remains, as of this month, a body whose terms of reference are still being drafted rather than a functioning institution.
India’s own positioning on this front predates the summit by months: earlier in 2026, India pitched the concept of a “BRICS Space Economy” as the bloc’s next frontier of collective economic growth, calling for coordinated action on innovation, investment, and entrepreneurship in the sector — language that frames RSSC expansion and the Space Council less as pure scientific cooperation and more as governance scaffolding for a shared commercial space sector across eleven-plus member states.
The declaration’s space-law commitments sit in its Paragraph 46, and the language there is precise enough to be worth summarizing closely rather than in broad strokes alone: BRICS leaders reasserted their support for the long-term sustainability of outer-space activities and for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, opposing the weaponization of orbital assets and threats or the use of force against satellites, and calling for negotiations toward a legally binding multilateral instrument to that effect. The declaration specifically recognizes the submission of the updated draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space — first put before the Conference on Disarmament in 2014 — as an important step, while also endorsing non-binding Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures as a practical complement to a binding treaty that remains, in practice, years from ratification given the divergent positions of major spacefaring powers outside the bloc. It is a diplomatically significant position — BRICS now includes three of the world’s demonstrated anti-satellite-capable powers, Russia, China, and India, alongside members with no offensive space capability at all — but the PAROS language is best read as a restated negotiating position rather than a new binding commitment; the Conference on Disarmament has held a PAROS negotiating mandate for years without producing a ratified treaty, and this declaration’s contribution is renewed multilateral pressure rather than a breakthrough.
The declaration paired its forward-looking space-governance language with a symbolic historical marker: leaders’ formal recognition of the 65th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first human spaceflight on April 12, 1961, a nod to Russia’s founding role in human spaceflight that carries particular resonance given Roscosmos’s continuing role as one of the RSSC’s five founding agencies.
For India’s own Earth-science and water-resources research community, the practical payoff of RSSC expansion lies less in any single new satellite than in broadened access to a shared, cross-border dataset for hydrological mapping, cross-border aquifer tracking, and coastal-erosion monitoring — applications the constellation’s founding agencies identified as core use cases from the outset, and which become considerably more powerful once member-state satellite fleets extend from the original five agencies to include the newer members’ own emerging space capabilities. That broadening, together with the Space Council’s still-developing governance mandate, is the concrete institutional story behind September’s declaration: not a new constellation launched, but an existing five-nation data-sharing mechanism being widened toward eleven, and a still-nascent multilateral space authority beginning to take shape around it.
– Rashmi Kumari
