Today, on October 21, in a landmark achievement for India’s space programme, the test flight for Gaganyaan was successfully launched and made a soft sea landing. The test successfully demonstrated India’s potential to send humans into space and bring them back safely.

The crew module of the spaceflight was safely retrieved by the Indian Navy. This test was conducted to check the safety mechanisms before sending Indian astronauts to space. It is important to mention that so far, India has depended on foreign space agencies such as Russia’s Russian Federal Space Agency [Roscosmos] and United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] to send its astronauts to space. 

Test Vehicle D1 mission was scheduled for a lift-off from the launch pad at 8 AM which was later revised to 8:45 AM. But just 5 seconds before the launch, the countdown stopped. Indian Space Research Organisation [ISRO] identified the cause and successfully pulled off the test at 10 AM.

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“We are very happy to announce the success of the mission. The purpose of the mission was to demonstrate the crew escape system. The vehicle went slightly above the speed of sound, before it initiated the crew escape system,” S Somanath, chairperson of the ISRO said from the mission centre in Sriharikota.

“The escape system took the crew module away from the vehicle and subsequent operations including the touch-down at the sea have been very well accomplished,” he added.

India will demonstrate its human spaceflight capabilities in a mission called Gaganyaan which is scheduled to launch in 2024. ISRO is aiming at sending humans into space on a Low Earth Orbit of 400 kilometres for three days and bring them safely back to the Earth.

ISRO has announced that country will set up a space station by 2035 and work on a Venus orbiter as well as a Mars lander in the coming years.