Gaganyaan vs ISS: India’s Mission Is About Proving Indigenous Technology

Why in the News

The Indian astronaut who flew on Axiom Mission 4 has described Gaganyaan as a prototype mission built to prove technology, test systems and communicate with the ground, unlike the International Space Station flight, which was an established mission of experiments and return. The distinction separates having flown from owning the capability to fly. Axiom Space owned no hardware, while the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is building the capsule and the spacecraft in house.

What is the Gaganyaan mission?

1. About: It is India’s first human spaceflight programme, designed to carry a crew to low Earth orbit in an indigenously built crew module and return them safely.
2. Nature of the mission: It is a prototype mission, focused on proving the technology, testing out systems and communicating with the ground, not on a defined experiment schedule.
3. In house hardware: ISRO is building the capsule and the spacecraft in which the astronauts will travel, and launching Indian astronauts on an Indian vehicle.
4. Engineering intensity: The work is described as heavy engineering, with robust processes and review mechanisms being set up around it.
5. Status: The programme is scheduled over the next year or two, and preparation is currently ground based.

What was Axiom Mission 4?

1. About: It was a commercial crewed mission to the International Space Station, on which an Indian became only the second Indian in space and the first in over four decades.
2. Duration: The Indian crew member spent 20 days at the International Space Station after a launch on 25 June.

What is microgravity?

1. About: It is the condition of near weightlessness experienced in orbit, where objects and fluids behave differently from how they behave on the ground.
2. Why it matters for training: Microgravity cannot be simulated on the ground, so the environment is encountered fully only in flight.

Why is the Axiom model not comparable to the Gaganyaan model?

1. Axiom owned no hardware: Axiom Space is a private company coordinating missions to space and did not own any of the hardware used.
2. Station ownership: The International Space Station is owned by NASA and its international partners, not by the mission coordinator.
3. Vehicle ownership: The crew flew in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, launched by the Falcon 9 rocket, both owned by SpaceX.
4. ISRO’s position: India is attempting to make the hardware in house and launch its own astronauts in its own capsule, which is a different nature of work.
5. Consequence: The two programmes cannot be compared, because one buys access to space and the other builds the means of access.

What did India actually gain from the Axiom flight?

1. Stated objective: The primary objective of the mission was to learn as much as possible and use that experience to enable India’s own mission.
2. Observation team: An ISRO team was present alongside the astronaut to observe how operations were run.
3. End to end exposure: The team witnessed the end to end execution of an entire crewed mission, from preparation to recovery.
4. Ecosystem lesson: ISRO has launched many successful missions, but human spaceflight requires a different ecosystem, and the scale of operations was the biggest learning.
5. Disciplines identified: The flight showed the range of disciplines India must address before sending people to space and bringing them back.

Back2Basics: International Space Station

1. What it is: The largest crewed structure in low Earth orbit, operated as a multinational research laboratory.
2. First module: The Zarya module was launched in 1998, with continuous human occupation since November 2000.
3. Partners: Five participating space agencies, NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
4. Orbit: It orbits at roughly 400 km altitude, completing an orbit in about 90 minutes and around 16 orbits a day.
5. Function: It hosts microgravity research in biology, human physiology, materials science and Earth observation.
6. Retirement: The station is planned for controlled deorbit around 2030 to 2031, which is driving commercial station projects.

Government Initiatives

1. Indian Space Policy, 2023: Opens the space sector to non government entities across the value chain and redefines the roles of ISRO, IN-SPACe and NSIL.
2. IN-SPACe: The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, a single window autonomous body that authorises and promotes private space activity.
3. NewSpace India Limited (NSIL): The commercial arm of the Department of Space, handling technology transfer and demand driven satellite and launch missions.
4. Gaganyaan Programme: Sanctioned in 2018 and later expanded in scope and outlay to include the first module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station.
5. Foreign Direct Investment reform, 2024: Liberalised FDI limits for satellite manufacturing, launch vehicles and ground segment components.
6. SpaDeX: The Space Docking Experiment, which demonstrated autonomous docking of two Indian satellites, a prerequisite technology for a space station and crewed missions.

Key Facts about India in Space

1. First Indian in space: Flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz T-11 mission in 1984, spending about eight days aboard the Salyut 7 station.
2. Second Indian in space: Flew on Axiom Mission 4 in 2025, over four decades after the first flight, spending 20 days at the International Space Station.
3. ISRO: Established in 1969, headquartered in Bengaluru, functioning under the Department of Space.
4. Chandrayaan 3: Made India the first country to soft land near the lunar south pole, in August 2023, with National Space Day observed on 23 August.
5. Aditya L1: India’s first solar observatory, placed in a halo orbit around the Sun Earth Lagrange point L1.
6. Private launch: India’s first privately built rocket flew a suborbital mission in November 2022, marking the entry of startups into launch services.

“[2025] Consider the following space missions:
I. Axiom-4
II. SpaDeX
III. Gaganyaan
How many of the space missions given above encourage and support microgravity research?
(a) Only one
(b) Only two
(c) All the three
(d) None