New Delhi: At the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the names of the four astronauts undergoing training for India’s maiden human space flight mission Gaganyaan.
All the four — Group Captain Prasanth Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla — are test and fighter pilots from the Indian Air Force (IAF).
The group has been undergoing training for the past two years in India.
The four pilots underwent the tests undertaken by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) among a pool of test pilots who participated voluntarily.
Commissioned in the IAF’s fighter stream in 1998, Group Captain Nair is a Category ‘A’ flying instructor and a test pilot with approximately 3,000 hours of flying experience that include aircraft ranging from Su-30 MKI, MiG-21, MiG-29 to Hawk, Dornier and An-32. He has also commanded a Su-30 squadron.
Group Captain Krishnan was commissioned in 2003 and is a flying instructor and a test pilot with approximately 2,900 hours of flying experience. He has flown aircraft such as Su-30 MKI, MiG-21, MiG-29, Jaguar, Dornier and An-32.
Group Captain Pratap is a flying instructor and a test pilot with approximately 2,200 hours of flying experience. He also has the experience of flying various aircraft in the IAF’s inventory.
Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla, the junior-most among the four, was commissioned in the air force’s fighter stream in 2006. He is a fighter combat leader and a test pilot with nearly 2,000 hours of experience flying.
The four candidates initially trained with Russia, where they are said to have gone through various modules including elements such as medical and physical training, studying the Russian language as well as the design, layout and systems of the Soyuz transport manned spacecraft.
In 2019, the Manned Space Flight Centre of ISRO and the Glavkosmos company, a part of the Roscosmos State Corporation, had signed the contract for the training of Indian candidates.
Upon completion of the Russian leg of training, the four astronaut candidates started training at the Astronaut Training Facility established by ISRO in Bengaluru.
They are further set to go on to train in the United States, an IAF source told ThePrint.
It was during PM Modi’s visit in September last year that US President Joe Biden had announced that the two countries were collaborating to send an Indian astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024.
Taking forward the two countries’ space cooperation, the two countries had signed the Artemis Accords — a US-led international partnership on planetary exploration — in July 2023. India was the 27th signatory of the three-year-old Artemis Accords.
The source further said that while all the four will train under NASA, one of them would be launched on a US mission to the ISS.
India’s Gaganyaan manned flight is expected in 2025 or later. The project envisages demonstration of human spaceflight capability by launching a three-member crew to an orbit of 400 km for a three-day mission and to bring them back to the Earth by splashdown landing in Indian sea waters, according to ISRO.
The indigenous LVM3 rocket will be deployed for the mission.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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