4 Astronauts for India’s Gaganyaan Mission Announced by PM Modi

Thiruvananthapuram: Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the names of the four astronauts who will travel to space as part of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Gaganyaan project, India’s first crewed space mission.

The PM revealed the names of these astronauts during his visit to the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, on Tuesday.

The four selected astronauts are Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, (Group Captain) Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubanshu Shukla. They are all either wing commanders or group captains in the Indian Air Force (IAF) with long experience as test pilots. These four astronauts are undergoing training at ISRO’s astronaut training facility in Bengaluru.

They were selected through a selection procedure at IAF’s Institute of Aerospace Medicine.

ISRO and Glavkosmos (a subsidiary of Russian space agency Roscosmos) signed a memorandum of understanding for the training of four astronauts in June 2019. The four astronauts trained at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in February 2020 till March 2021.

American space agency NASA will also train an Indian astronaut for a mission to the International Space Station by the end of 2024.

The Gaganyaan mission will launch astronauts to an orbit 400 kilometres above the Earth for a 3-day mission. They will be brought back to Earth with a landing in Indian sea waters.