Just months after making history with a momentous landing on the moon’s south pole, India hopes to become the fourth nation in history to launch a crewed expedition into space, introducing four crew members for its inaugural ‘Gaganyaan’ space project on Tuesday.
The first mission of its sort for India, Gaganyaan, or “sky craft” in Hindi, is expected to cost roughly 90.23 billion rupees ($1.1 billion). Over the course of the following year, a livable space capsule will be sent into an orbit 400 kilometers (250 miles) in the Indian Ocean, and it will land there to return.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi awarded the four crew members, all of them air force officers, “astronaut wings” at a space centre in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala state on Tuesday, in their first public appearance after months of rigorous training.
The four officers are Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla, a government statement said.
It was not clear if all four astronauts would be on board the mission.
Gaganyaan is a “historic” achievement for India, Modi said on X and in a statement, coming four decades after air force officer, Rakesh Sharma, became the first Indian to travel to space – with a Soviet mission.
“Time is ours, countdown is ours and so is the rocket,” Modi told space scientists.
Only the United States, Russia, and China have sent their own crewed missions into space.
Astronauts from more than three dozen other countries have made space trips aboard either U.S. or Russian missions.
$1 = 82.8920 Indian rupees
