Gaganyaan and the Bharatiya Antariksh Station

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Human spaceflight and space stations

Gaganyaan is India's programme to fly its own astronauts on its own rocket, approved in 2018 at Rs 9,023 crore. The vehicle is the human rated LVM3, carrying an orbital module of two parts: a crew module, the capsule the astronauts sit in, and a service module that carries propulsion, power and life support. A crew escape system of solid motors can pull the capsule clear of the rocket if something fails; it was tested in the TV D1 flight of 2023. The mission profile is three days in a 400 km orbit and a splashdown in the Arabian Sea. Four Air Force pilots trained as the first crew, and one flew to the International Space Station in 2025 on a commercial mission. Beyond Gaganyaan the Cabinet approved in 2024 a Bharatiya Antariksh Station, with the first module by 2028 and a crewed Moon landing as the 2040 goal.

• The sequence: uncrewed test flights with the humanoid Vyommitra aboard, then the first crewed flight; each uncrewed flight qualifies the capsule's re entry, parachutes and recovery.
• What human rating adds: redundancy in every system, an abort capability at every phase, and an environmental control and life support system that keeps pressure, oxygen, temperature and carbon dioxide within limits.
• Re entry is the hardest part: the capsule meets the atmosphere at about 7 km a second and its blunt base and ablative heat shield turn the energy into a shock layer of hot gas that stays off the surface.
• Radiation: low Earth orbit sits under most of the Van Allen belts, so a three day mission is safe; a station and a Moon mission need shielding and dose limits, which is why the station's design matters.
• The station plan: five modules, a first module launched by LVM3 in 2028 and the full station by 2035, in a 400 km orbit with a crew of three to four; it follows the International Space Station's retirement plan and China's Tiangong.
• Only three countries have launched people on their own rockets, the Soviet Union and Russia, the United States and China; Gaganyaan would make India the fourth.

Mains: A human spaceflight programme buys three things a satellite programme cannot: life support and re entry engineering, a seat at the table when the rules for stations and the Moon are written, and a reason for a generation to study engineering; the cost is that every rupee is visible.

Further reading: Gaganyaan (ISRO) · Gaganyaan FAQ (ISRO)

See also: Gaganyaan · Re-entry heat shielding · ISRO's launch vehicles and the orbits they serve · The Artemis Accords