Indo-US cooperation in the space arena dates back to the very beginning of the Indian space programme. The very first sounding rocket, a Nike-Apache launched from Thumba on November 21, 1963 was a US made rocket that carried instruments to conduct ionospheric experiments over the earth's magnetic equator that passes over Thumba. Several more such rockets were launched later for various scientific missions.

India conducted the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in the mid 1970s for which NASA repositioned its Applications Technology Satellite (ATS-6) over the Indian Ocean. SITE involved deployment of Direct Reception TV sets in about 2400 villages across six states of India to receive educational programmes via ATS-6, covering agriculture, family planning, health and hygiene, etc. The experiment was hailed as the world's largest sociological experiment. This played a significant role to demonstrate the application of satellites for TV-based developmental education and telecommunication for a large country like India. This was followed by the establishment of the multipurpose Indian National Satellite (INSAT) System in the 80s. All the four satellites under INSAT-1 series were built by a US Company to India's specifications and three of them were put into orbit by US launch vehicles including INSAT-1B, orbited by the US space Shuttle Challenger. Today, INSAT has become one of the largest domestic satellite systems in the Asia Pacific region, with all satellites designed and built in India.

In the field of remote sensing, India was one of the first countries to establish a reception station for receiving data from NASA's Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), later renamed as LANDSAT. This facilitated India to gain experience in the reception, processing and application of space-based remote sensing data. A number of joint experiment projects in remote sensing were also undertaken using LANDSAT data with the participation of end users. Later, India designed and built its own operational Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites and established National Natural Resources Management System (NNRMS) for the application of data from these satellites. Today, India has the world's largest constellation of civilian remote sensing satellites to provide data in a variety of spatial resolutions and spectral bands which is being received by several ground stations from all over the world including USA, that meet the requirements of various applications in resource management.

In 1997, the Department of Space (DOS) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) from India and NASA and NOAA from the US, signed a Memorandum of Understanding for joint research in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.