IT Home reported on October 26 that India's first manned space flight program "Gaganyaan" (Sanskrit Gaganyaan, meaning "sky ship") aims to send three astronauts into orbit at an altitude of 400 kilometers next year and bring them back three days later.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) originally planned to conduct the first unmanned flight test in December this year, but according to a tender document provided by ISRO, the test mission has been postponed to February~March 2025, and the specific time will be announced later.
India's ISRO unveiled a list of four astronaut candidates in February (only three of whom would be selected) and called them "dreamers, adventurers and warriors ready to go into space", including Indian Air Force Colonel Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair and Colonel Ajit• Ajit Krishnan, Colonel Angad Pratap, and Lieutenant Colonel Shubhanshu Shukla, And intensively train in the Star City of Moscow.
It is worth mentioning that Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian astronaut, flew aboard the Soyuz T-11 to the Soviet Salyut 7 space station in April 1984, and no Indian citizen has been in space to represent his country since then (NASA astronauts of Indian descent can only represent the United States).
In August last year, India's Chandrayaan-3 probe successfully soft landed in the region near the moon's south pole, making India the fourth country in the world to successfully land on the moon and the first to land near the moon's south pole. India then also announced a new space program, saying it aims to build a space station by 2035 and send astronauts to the moon by 2040.
India's first manned space flight is named after the Sanskrit word "Gaganyaan", and the manned space mission is estimated to cost about 9.023 billion rupees (note from IT House: about 7.649 billion yuan currently). If successful, India will become the fourth country to send humans into space, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China.