
IAF ready for space challenge, says Air chief
Why is it in news?
- The Indian Air Force and its arms are fully geared up for supporting the first Indian human space mission of 2022.
More in news
- The Human Space Flight Programme or HSP is daunting and throws a different kind of challenge at the IAF.
- IAM will play a key role in human engineering support and the development of the space crew capsule.
- Selection of astronauts would take 12-14 months.
- Indian Space Research Organisation, which is tasked with the mission, also called Gaganyaan, has earlier said its three astronauts will most likely be from among the IAF’s test pilots.
- ISRO has discussed the project with IAF and the astronauts would be selected and trained at IAM and other places once the specific requirements of the flyers are finalised.
- First Indian cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma who went of Soyuz T-11 in 1984 and fellow test pilot and back-up cosmonaut Ravish Malhotra were trained at the IAM and the then Soviet Union during 1982-84.
- Challenge of Gaganyaan is bigger as we are the only nation that decided to send man to space first before experiment with animals — which Russia, the U.S., Europe and China did.
Source
The Hindu