Thiruvananthapuram: Gaganyaan is a mission that India is waiting for, with great hope and pride. Yesterday (February 27,2024), the Prime Minister announced the names of the astronauts who are preparing to write history through the mission – to send humans into space. It is reported that the mission will be completed in the second half of 2025.
Criticisms were raised from some quarters that, the names of the Gaganyaan passengers have been revealed much before the mission. ISRO chief S Somnath has come out with a precise and clear answer to this.
Group Captains Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla were selected for the mission. S Somnath said that three of them will be trained by the American space agency NASA and one will be taken to the International Space Station (ISS) before the mission. This NASA-cooperative spaceflight is intended for providing further training and design refinement ahead of the Gaganyaan mission.
The names of the astronauts selected by India for the prestigious Gaganyaan cannot be kept a secret when one of the team members is on a space mission with NASA. Somnath said that this is the reason why the Prime Minister disclosed the details of the passengers a year before the mission.
Somnath also said that the mission will be preceded by other test missions like the G1 mission, which will carry the Vyommitra robot into space in July; the G2 mission, which will launch the unmanned crew module by the end of this year and G3 mission by the middle of next year. H1 mission, the actual mission, will then follow these missions to take humans into space.
(Crew module is capable of transporting four to six crew members beyond the moon, providing a safe habitat from launch through landing and recovery. Inside the familiar deep-space capsule shape are advances in life support, avionics, power systems, and advanced manufacturing techniques)
The crew module in this mission has capacity for three people, but only one will be selected as it is the first mission. It will be brought back to Earth after traveling in orbit for a day. According to the design, it can remain in orbit for up to three days, but the first time will not be experimented to take that long, the ISRO chief said. S Somnath informed that the aim of the mission is only to prove that it is possible to send humans into space and bring them back safely.
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