Gaganyaan G1: India's First Uncrewed Orbital Test Flight
The Gaganyaan Programme
Approved in December 2018 at a cost of about ₹9,023 crore (later enhanced to ₹20,193 crore with the Bharatiya Antariksh Station precursor missions), Gaganyaan aims to send a three-member crew to a 400 km low Earth orbit for up to three days and return them safely to Indian waters. India would become the fourth nation with independent human spaceflight capability after Russia, the US and China.
- Launcher: HLVM3 — the LVM3 upgraded with redundancy, a Crew Escape System and human-rating of the cryogenic stage.
- Orbital Module: Crew Module (pressurised, with Environmental Control and Life Support System) and Service Module.
- Astronaut-designates: four IAF test pilots trained in Russia and at the Astronaut Training Facility, Bengaluru; Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the ISS in 2025 on Axiom-4.
What G1 Tests
- End-to-end mission profile: launch, orbital insertion, on-orbit operations, deorbit, re-entry and parachute-assisted splashdown in the Bay of Bengal.
- Vyommitra records cabin parameters and simulates crew functions; a Crew Module Recovery Model was validated with the Indian Navy.
- Earlier milestones: TV-D1 abort test (October 2023) proved the Crew Escape System; IADT and pad-abort tests validated parachutes.
Significance
Beyond prestige, human-rating drives advances in reliability engineering, materials, life sciences and recovery logistics that feed into commercial launch services under IN-SPACe reforms. G1's data on thermal protection and parachute performance will fix the design freeze for the crewed H1 flight.
Test Yourself
2 graded questions · Prelims format
With reference to India's human spaceflight programme, consider the following statements:
- 1.Gaganyaan aims to place a crew in a low Earth orbit of about 400 km.
- 2.Vyommitra is a half-humanoid robot that will fly on the uncrewed test missions.
- 3.The launch vehicle for Gaganyaan is a human-rated version of the PSLV.
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