India Plans To Have Its Own Space Station

India has plans to set up its own space station in the future and aims at conducting separate missions for studying Venus and the Sun, according to a statement made on Thursday. The country has developed to become the leader regarding the area of space tech while inspiring young people to give this field a try.

According to the latest statement, ISRO will start working on a space station following Gaganyaan, India’s first crewed mission launched into space in 2022, which will also be the 75^th anniversary of India’s independence from Britain. It has also been recently unveiled that the Indian government has granted the Gaganyaan mission with Rs 10 crore.

ISRO Chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan said that the Gaganyaan program needs sustaining after the human space mission is launched. That means India needs a space station of its own.

Sivan shared that communication, navigation, and Earth observation are the most important things to them, but missions like Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, Gaganyaan are what excites young minds the most, helps unite the country, as well as pave the way to the future of India’s technology.

At a press conference, he said:

ISRO aims to send two or three people with the Gaganyaan mission for as long as 7 days. The spacecraft will stay in low Earth orbit, at about 300-400 kilometers from the planet.

After the Gaganyaan, the space agency will submit a report to the government, detailing how it plans to build the space station. Right now, it believes that conceptualizing the station would take between five and seven years to finish.

Along with the announcement, the Indian Space Research Organization also revealed that in the first half of 2020, it will launch mission Aditya-L1, which is designed to study the Sun’s corona which impacts on Earth’s climate, as well as another mission to Venus a few years from now.

The space agency made the ambitious announcement just a day after saying that it will launch the lunar mission Chandrayaan 2 on July 15, which is likely to make India the world’s fourth country to touch the Moon, after Russia, the US, and China.

On this mission, there will be a lander, a rover, and an orbiter built by ISRO. Back in 2008, India completed the first lunar mission with over 3,400 orbits, playing an important role in discovering water molecules on the Moon.

Since the early 60s, ISRO has focused on launching low-cost missions, with rocket components transported by bicycles and assembled by hand. Dated back 2014, the country spent $74 million on a Mars mission, which was $671 million cheaper than the one US conducted in the same year. Then in 2017, the space agency set a new world record for sending 104 satellites into space within 18 minutes.