Giving a boost to India’s maiden human space flight programme, the Cabinet has approved £1 billion for the Gaganyaan project, whose 2022 deadline was fixed by PM Narendra Modi during his Independence Day speech on August 15, 2018. “We will send a three-member crew to space for seven days. It will be in collaboration with industry, academia, scientific agencies, labs and stakeholders along with Isro. We’ll try to launch the first test-flight demonstration within 40 months after the budget approval,” law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.
The manned mission will help India become the fourth nation after Russia, US and China to send humans to space. Isro chairman K Sivan said, “Isro has taken up the challenge and we will meet the PM’s 2022 deadline. We have been (informally) working on the project for the past four months. I have set up a team to work on the design for the mission. This work will be over by January.”
Giving the schedule for test-flights before the final mission, the Isro chairman said, “We will launch two unmanned missions before the final mission. The first unmanned test-flight will be in December 2020. The second unmanned test will be conducted in July 2021 and finally, the human space flight will be launched in December 2021.”
On training of astronauts, Sivan said, “With the budget cleared for the mission, we will now work seriously on training schedule of the crew, including foreign training, if needed."
