PM Modi reveals names of 4 astronauts for Gaganyaan mission

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced the names of the four astronauts that will fly to low-Earth orbit as part of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Gaganyaan, which will be the first crewed Indian space mission. The PM made the announcement while visiting the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubanshu Shukla have been selected to be the astronauts on India’s first crewed mission to space. They are all either wing commanders or group captains in the Indian Air Force (IAF) and have extensive experience working as test pilots, which means they are already trained to be prepared to respond quickly in situations where something goes wrong. Nair is from the town of Nenmara in Palakkad, according to the Malayalam-language publication Mathrubhumi and joined the Air Force in 1999 after completing a degree in engineering from NSS College, which is also in Palakkad.

The four astronauts have been undergoing training at the space agency’s astronaut training facility in Bengaluru. The selection of the astronauts happened at IAF’s Institute of Aerospace Medicine. Only three of them will eventually go to space as part of the Gaganyaan mission.

ISRO and Glavkosmos (a subsidiary of Russian space agency Roscosmos) signed a memorandum of understanding for the training of four astronauts in June 2019. The four astronauts trained at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in February 2020 till March 2021.