India's Gaganyaan Space Mission to Launch First Flight Tests This Year

The mission was announced by PM Narendra Modi during his 2018 Independence Day speech. It was originally planned to launch three Indian astronauts by 2022, but the mission has been delayed several times due to Covid-19 restrictions.

India will conduct its first test flight of the Gaganyaan manned space mission later this year, Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh has said. The final flight is expected to take place in 2024.

The minister noted that Covid-19-related impediments affected the schedule of the expedition.

"The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the training of astronauts in Russia as well as India," Singh said.

“The Gaganyaan is India’s first manned space mission that aims to demonstrate indigenous capability to undertake human space flight to Low Earth Orbit,” according to the official website of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

The program worked closely with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which selected and trained four Indian astronauts and made spacesuits for them. The pilots have already returned to India and now are awaiting the space flight in 2024.

The $1.5 billion program will carry out two unmanned test flights and one manned voyage. The test flights are set to launch a spacecraft at an altitude of 15 km during which scientists will simulate an emergency to oversee the safe return of the crew capsule to Earth. The second test flight is a similar double check at a higher altitude.

If the program is successful, India will become the fourth nation to launch a human spaceflight mission after Russia, USA and China.

The first Indian spacewalker was Rakesh Sharma, who flew on the 1984 Soyuz T-11 spacecraft as part of the Soviet Intercosmos project. Since, no Indian citizen has ever flown into space. The pilots of the Gaganyaan mission are ready to change that.