How Gaganyaan Mission Makes Us All Indians Proud

Just a few days ago, we learned that India has confirmed a Rs 10,000 crore budget for our first manned space mission, a milestone marking our step into the new era of space flight. With this Gaganyaan mission comes anticipation and excitement. And though there’s still lots of work to do, we all have reasons to be proud of this program.

India’s determination

In 2022, the mission will take off from Andhra Pradesh, at the Sriharikota spaceport. The mission will bring the "Vyomnauts” crew, including three members, into an orbit that's low-Earth. The spaceship and its human team will stay there for seven days at least before returning to our home planet to report.

The Sriharikota spaceport

To launch this mission, ISRO has collaborated with national agencies, using three-stage GSLV Mk III rocket.

ISRO will join an exclusive club

If India complete this mission successfully, our country exclusively stand among the few nations that have brought human beings into space, including China, Russia, and the US. Nevertheless, the source of experience for India to learn from will also be more limited. It is not only challenging to build a rocket with enough stability to reach outer space but also unsafe to keep the crew out there.

40 years ago, the US landed on the Moon

While floating in orbit, the Vyomnauts crew will have to do exercise frequently. If ISRO doesn’t train them first, this will be the first time the astronauts live in almost complete isolation. In case of a medical emergency, these three astronauts must deal with the situation by themselves, using their own medical knowledge. There is a great deal of brave required here.

It’s extremely low cost

Dated back 2013, India took the entire world’s attention when it launched the Mangalyaan due to the striking humble cost of Rs 450 crore (approximately $74 million), as opposed to the $672 million Mars orbiter of NASA.

The Mangalyaan

The Gaganyaan is another cheap space mission that costs only Rs 10,000 crore (about $1.4 billion), cheaper than several Hollywood films.

Grade A for indigenous Indian tech

The reason why Indian space missions have low cost is that everything is as “local” as possible. The majority of the components and materials are domestic, the software and hardware of the missions are also developed internally from scratch.

Inside the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)

Besides, ISRO tries to reduce the weight of the missions. To do that, the space agency decides what their orbiter can explore, based on which they will cut the unnecessary capabilities.

India is taking its first leap into the unknown dark space

The Gaganyaan is another critical milestone for the world regarding space exploration, yet it’s not all for India. From this mission, our country is aiming at getting comfortable and experienced in sending humans into space, with the hope of one day putting them in Mars, the Moon, and beyond. Considering that, catching up with the leaders in this field is vital.

At present, NASA is currently working to putting humans on Mars in the next two years, and SpaceX is planning to bring a human-crewed mission to the red planet in the next six years. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is expecting to return to the Moon with a crewed spaceship by 2020.

Anyway, ISRO has hardly postponed it launches. So once they succeed in sending a crewed mission to orbit on a couple years, by 2024, we are likely to really get to the Moon. For this to come true, it will take a small budget, lots of work, as well as a great deal of good luck.