As NASA’s Artemis II’s Orion capsule, named ‘Integrity’, carries four NASA astronauts on a lunar voyage in a living space often described as a minivan-sized capsule, India’s own “fabulous four” astronaut-designates, or Gaganyatris, are undertaking a rehearsal of a different kind – a high-altitude analogue mission in the cold desert of Ladakh, the stark ‘moonscape’ where oxygen is scarce and conditions are harsh.
This is Mission MITRA (Mapping of Interoperable Traits & Reliability Assessment), a field simulation jointly developed by ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre (HSFC) and Protoplanet – with the latter as the lead executing partner – and supported by specialists spanning engineering, medicine and psychology. The premise is simple: before India takes its next big leap in human spaceflight, it must understand the most complex system of all – the human being inside the mission
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