One Gaganyaan crew member to visit International Space Station in August: Union minister

One of the four crew members selected for Gaganyaan, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) first human-crewed spaceflight, will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) after August, according to Union minister Jitendra Singh.

The space station visit will be a joint exercise involving ISRO and NASA, the Indian space agency’s US counterpart, the minister informed the Lok Sabha on Friday.

“ISRO is pursuing a joint mission with NASA to ISS, wherein one ‘Gaganyaatri’ will undertake space travel to ISS,” Singh said.

“This is a collaborative effort of ISRO, NASA, and Axiom Space, a NASA-identified private entity. Recently, ISRO signed a space flight agreement with Axiom Space for this joint mission,” he added.

The statement by Singh, the Minister of State (MoS) for Science and Technology, came on a query by Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy, about the ‘Axiom-4 Mission,’ astronauts, and the Gaganyaan mission.

As per the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), this will be the fourth private astronaut mission to the ISS, and is scheduled to be launched no earlier than August 2024 from the agency’s Florida-based Kennedy Space Center.

In February, prime minister Narendra Modi revealed the four ‘Gaganyaatris’ – elite fighter pilots of the Indian Air Force (IAF). They are group captains Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, and Angad Pratap, and wing commander Shubanshu Shukla.

Meanwhile Singh, the Union minister, also told the House that the IAF pilots are undergoing training at ISRO’s Astronauts Training Facility in Bengaluru.

“They have completed two out of three semesters of their training programme. Independent training simulator and static mockup simulators have been realised,” he stated.

The three-day Gaganyaan project is expected to launch next year.