The first crewed Indian space mission, Gaganyaan, is being conducted by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revealed the identities of the four astronauts who will travel to low-Earth orbit. The statement was made by the PM while in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.
Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan, Shubanshu Shukla, and Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair have been chosen to be the astronauts on India’s first crewed space mission. They have a great deal of expertise as test pilots and are all wing commanders or group captains in the Indian Air Force (IAF). This means they are already trained to react fast in the event if something goes wrong.
According to the Malayalam-language journal Mathrubhumi, Nair joined the Air Force in 1999 after earning an engineering degree from NSS College, located in Palakkad. Nair hails from the town of Nenmara in Palakkad.
The space agency’s astronaut training center in Bengaluru has been the training ground for the four astronauts. The astronauts were chosen from the Institute of Aerospace Medicine, part of the IAF. In the end, just three of them will fly into space as part of the Gaganyaan project.
In June 2019, a memorandum of agreement was signed by ISRO and Glavkosmos, a division of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, for the training of four astronauts. From February 2020 to March 2021, the four astronauts received training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia.
During a visit to Delhi in 2023, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the agency will also prepare an Indian astronaut for a journey to the International Space Station by the end of 2024. At the time, The Indian Express claimed that the selection will probably come from the four candidates who are getting ready for the Gaganyaan expedition. The Gaganyaan mission will launch people into a three-day orbit 400 kilometers above Earth to showcase India’s potential for human spaceflight. Following that, a safe landing in Indian Ocean waters will bring them back to Earth.
