ISRO Chairman S. Somanath has said that the space agency has a long-term plan for the Gaganyaan programme.
Mr. Somanath, who hosted an hour-long live Instagram session, said that the Gaganyaan programme that envisages to launch astronauts to an orbit of 400 km for a three-day mission will not be a one off event.
Bhartiya Anatriksha Station
“We have a long-term plan now for Gaganyaan, what we call continued access to space by Indians. We will also be building a space station (Bhartiya Anatriksha Station) for which we have a goal to launch it by 2035 besides going to the moon etc.,” Mr. Somanath said.
In reply to a question by a student on whether the future ISRO will choose astronauts from the bio stream, Mr. Somanath said, ’‘The first set of astronauts are air force pilots as they have the type of skill sets to handle the early part of the Gaganyaan mission especially when it is under development. But future astronauts will be from various other skill sets, some of them can be engineers or bio scientists or doctors or even a person with a literary background.”
During an hour-long session, Mr. Somanath answered a wide range of questions from the audience and most of them were on how one could be part of the country’s space programme or ISRO.
“The ISRO Centralised Recruitment Board (ICRB) exam is a tough one. For every hundred vacancies that we have, we receive 1.5 lakh applications. There is a lot of interest and it is going to increase,” Mr. Somanath said replying to a query on whether the ICRB exam is tough to crack.
Increased capacity
On a question to the launch capacity augmentation that ISRO is undertaking and number of launches the space agency is undertaking, he said, ”If the users are more, the launches will be more and viceversa. Today at ISRO we have created a capability that up to 24 to 30 satellite launches are really possible theoretically.”
The ISRO Chairman said that for the Instagram session more than 450 questions were submitted by various people ranging from the age group of 6 to 74 years.
