Gaganyaan and Human Spaceflight: Mission, Vehicle, Astronauts

Gaganyaan is India's programme to send its own astronauts to space in an Indian spacecraft launched by an Indian rocket, and to bring them back safely. The Prime Minister announced it from the Red Fort in his Independence Day address in 2018, and the Indian Space Research Organisation set up a dedicated Human Space Flight Centre at Bengaluru for it the next year. Only the Soviet Union and Russia, the United States and China have so far launched human beings into orbit on their own, so the programme is asked in every general awareness paper as a matter of national capability rather than of rocketry alone.

What the mission is

The declared plan is to carry up to three crew members to a low Earth orbit of about four hundred kilometres for up to three days, and to bring the crew module down under parachutes for a splashdown at sea, where the Indian Navy recovers it. The spacecraft is called the orbital module and has two parts: the crew module, the habitable double walled cabin that returns to Earth, and the service module, an unpressurised section with propulsion, power and thermal systems that is discarded before re-entry. The cabin is kept at Earth-like pressure, temperature and oxygen levels by the environmental control and life support system.

The vehicle and the escape system

Gaganyaan flies on the LVM3, the heaviest Indian launcher, made human-rated for this purpose and then called HLVM3. It is a three stage vehicle with two large solid strap-on boosters, a liquid core stage and a cryogenic upper stage, and it is the same vehicle family that carried the Chandrayaan missions. Human rating means every system is built with wider margins, redundancy and added safety checks. Above the crew module sits the crew escape system, a set of quick-acting solid motors that can pull the crew module away from the rocket within seconds if anything goes wrong on the pad or during ascent. Testing that system, rather than the rocket, has been the main work of the programme so far.

The tests so far

• A pad abort test in 2018 at Sriharikota showed that the crew module could be pulled clear of a rocket standing on the launch pad.
• TV-D1, the first test vehicle abort mission, flew on 21 October 2023 from Sriharikota. It demonstrated the crew escape system at transonic speed, and the crew module was separated, brought down under parachutes and recovered from the sea.
• Integrated air drop tests have been used to prove the parachute sequence, and uncrewed orbital flights are planned before any crew flies.
• Vyommitra, a half-humanoid robot, is to fly on an uncrewed mission to test the cabin systems that a human crew will depend on.

The astronauts, and Indians in space before Gaganyaan

Four Indian Air Force test pilots were selected as astronaut-designates and trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia before continuing their training in India. Their names were made public in February 2024: Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla. India's space history already carries three names that papers ask about. Rakesh Sharma, an Indian Air Force pilot, became the first Indian in space on 3 April 1984, flying on the Soviet Soyuz T-11 to the Salyut 7 station under the Interkosmos programme, and famously told Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that India looked saare jahan se achha from orbit. Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin in space, flying for NASA in 1997, and died with her crew when the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. Sunita Williams, also of Indian origin, flew long duration missions for NASA to the International Space Station. In June 2025 Shubhanshu Shukla, one of the four Gaganyaan astronaut-designates, flew as pilot on the Axiom-4 mission and became the first Indian to work aboard the International Space Station.

What is planned after Gaganyaan

In 2023 the government set two longer goals for the Indian space programme: an Indian space station, named the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon. Gaganyaan is the first step towards both, because docking, life support, re-entry and recovery must be proved before a station can be assembled or a crew sent beyond Earth orbit. The SpaDeX mission, which demonstrated the docking of two Indian satellites in orbit, and the Chandrayaan series, which proved soft landing and sample-return rehearsal steps, belong to the same build-up.

Points that decide the question

• Gaganyaan is an ISRO programme; the launch vehicle is the human-rated LVM3 and not the PSLV or the GSLV Mk II.
• The orbital module is the crew module plus the service module; only the crew module returns.
• TV-D1 of October 2023 tested the crew escape system, not the orbit or the life support system.
• Rakesh Sharma flew on a Soviet spacecraft; the first Indian spacecraft to carry a crew will be Gaganyaan's own.
• Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams flew for NASA and were of Indian origin, not Indian astronauts sent by India.