Gaganyaan: India's human spaceflight programme

Gaganyaan is India's programme to send astronauts, called gaganyatris, into low Earth orbit in an Indian spacecraft launched by an Indian rocket, and to bring them safely home. It was announced by the Prime Minister in his Independence Day address on 15 August 2018, and the Union Cabinet approved the programme that December. Success would make India the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China, to independently launch humans into orbit.

The spacecraft, an orbital module, consists of a crew module, where the astronauts live, and a service module, which provides propulsion, power and life support. It is designed to carry up to three people to an orbit about 400 kilometres above Earth for up to seven days, and to return by splashing down in the sea, where recovery teams retrieve the crew. The launch vehicle is a human-rated version of the Launch Vehicle Mark-3, strengthened and tested for the higher reliability that crewed flight demands.

Safety drives the programme's sequence. Before any crew flies, ISRO must demonstrate a crew escape system that can pull the crew module away from a failing rocket, parachutes that slow the returning module, and life support that keeps astronauts alive in orbit. A crew escape demonstration, TV-D1, succeeded in October 2023. Uncrewed orbital test flights, including one carrying a half-humanoid robot named Vyommitra to test cabin systems, are planned before the first crewed flight. Timelines have shifted over the years as safety testing has taken priority, so dates for the crewed flight should be checked at the time of reading.

Human spaceflight is expensive, and its value is debated. Critics argue that robots can do most science more cheaply and without risking lives, and that the money could fund satellites, weather forecasting or education. Supporters argue that crewed flight drives advances in life support, materials, medicine and reliability that spread into other fields, builds a skilled workforce, and opens the way to a future Indian space station, whose first module has been proposed as a follow-on goal.

For civil studies, Gaganyaan is a case study in risk governance: a programme where the cost of failure is measured in lives, not only in money, and where schedule pressure must be weighed against safety. The programme's credibility will rest on its test record, not on its announcements.