ISRO chairman S Somanath on Wednesday said the space agency has decided to indigenously develop the environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) for the upcoming human space flight mission Gaganyaan, after it failed to get it from other countries. The Gaganyaan project envisages a demonstration of Indian Space Research Organisation’s human spaceflight capability by launching a human crew to an orbit of 400 km and bringing them safely back to earth by landing in Indian sea waters. It is expected to be launched in 2025. “We have no experience in developing an environmental control life support system. We were only designing rockets and satellites. We thought that this knowledge would come from other nations, but unfortunately after so much discussion, nobody is willing to give it to us,” Somanath said.
He was addressing the 5th edition of Manohar Parrikar Vidnyan Mahotsav 2023 at Dona Paula, an event organised by Goa’s Science, Environment and Technology Department. Somanath said that ISRO has now decided to indigenously develop the ECLSS. “We are going to develop it in India using the knowledge we have and using the industries that we have,” he said. Speaking about the challenges before the Gaganyaan programme, he said India has been into knowledge-building design capability development over the last so many years and the pinnacle of this is going to be the Indian human space flight programme.
“When we send humans to space through our Gaganyan programme, I think the amount of skill and confidence that we need to have has to be higher than what we currently have,” he said. Somanath said that the confidence-building process is happening all across ISRO today with the support of national laboratories. The first part of the Gaganyaan programme is the rocket.
“The rockets are always bound to fail; whenever it is ready for launch our tension and heartbeats go up because even if the rocket is built very safely having all the processes followed, something can still go wrong,” he said. “And if it goes wrong, then there is nobody who is able to correct it or adjust it. Thousands of elements should work without any flaw to make a launch happen,” he said. Somanath said that there is always a risk of failure. “When you have a failure possibility, then you must have protection against it in human space flight. This is a core of human space flight - that we should not put the risk of having the astronaut lost due to the failure in the rocket,” he said.
