Gaganyaan: India announces four-member crew for space mission

NEW DELHI: India introduced four crew members for its maiden ‘Gaganyaan’ space voyage, as it aims to become the world’s fourth country to send a crewed mission into space just months after a historic landing on the south pole of the moon.

Gaganyaan, or “sky craft” in Hindi, is the first mission of its kind for India and will cost about 90.23 billion rupees ($1.1 billion). It involves the launch of a habitable space capsule over the next year to an orbit of 400 km (250 miles) and its return via a landing in the Indian Ocean.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi awarded the four crew members, all of them air force officers, “astronaut wings” at a space centre in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala state on Tuesday, in their first public appearance after months of rigorous training.

“Time is ours, countdown is ours and so is the rocket,” Modi told space scientists.

The four officers are Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla, a government statement said.

The selection of the astronauts happened at Indian Air Force’s (IAF) Institute of Aerospace Medicine. Only three of them will eventually go to space as part of the Gaganyaan mission.

Gaganyaan is a “historic” achievement for India, Modi said on X and in a statement, coming four decades after air force officer, Rakesh Sharma, became the first Indian to travel to space – with a Soviet mission.

Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and Glavkosmos (a subsidiary of Russian space agency Roscosmos) signed a memorandum of understanding for the training of four astronauts in June 2019. The four astronauts trained at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in February 2020 till March 2021.

Only the United States, Russia, and China have sent their own crewed missions into space. Astronauts from more than three dozen other countries have made space trips aboard either U.S. or Russian missions.

NASA will also train an Indian astronaut for a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) by the end of 2024, said the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson, during a visit to Delhi in 2023.