Four Air Force Test Pilots Were Named India's Astronauts in February 2024, and One of Them Has Already Flown to the Space Station

On 27 February 2024, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened his speech by asking the hall to give four men a standing ovation. The Press Information Bureau’s account of the morning says the hall “reverberated with the chants of Bharat Mata ki Jai.” The four were Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla, officers of the Indian Air Force, and he presented each with astronaut wings.

In January 2020 the space minister, Dr Jitendra Singh, had said four astronauts were selected but “their identity cannot be revealed.” Four years later the Prime Minister introduced them by name. He told the hall: “An Indian is going into space after 40 years. However, now, the time, the countdown as well as the rocket belong to us.” The last Indian to fly was Rakesh Sharma, in 1984, in a spacecraft the PIB noted in 2020 was “not Indian.”

He also made a request on the four’s behalf. The PIB says he raised concern that celebrity attention could disturb their training, and appealed for cooperation with the four and their families so that they could continue without distraction.

Why the four are all test pilots

The programme, Gaganyaan (“sky craft”), was approved by the Union Cabinet on 28 December 2018. The Cabinet note called for two uncrewed flights and one crewed flight, a crew of three, and a mission lasting from one orbit to a maximum of seven days. Total cost would stay “within Rs.10,000 crore” (a crore is ten million), and the first crewed flight would come 40 months after sanction. IANS reported in 2019 that Modi had announced the programme in his Independence Day speech the year before.

The astronauts came from the Air Force’s test pilots, officers who fly new and modified aircraft to find out how they behave. By 6 September 2019 the Air Force reported the first level of selection complete at its Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Bengaluru. The pilots, it said, had passed through physical exercise tests, laboratory investigations, clinical tests, radiological tests and a psychology evaluation.

ThePrint noted in February 2024 that ISRO had not made public how the candidates were selected. India shortlisted 12 candidates, then 10, and announced four, according to the same report. All four came from the Air Force, it said, which gave them the flying experience a spaceflight needs, and the first batch was all men because the force had inducted its first women fighter pilots only in 2016.

Twelve months at the Gagarin centre, then Bengaluru

Russia entered the programme through a contract that ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre signed with Glavkosmos, a subsidiary of Roscosmos, on 27 June 2019. Glavkosmos would help with selecting candidates, their medical examination and their space training. In February 2020 the company said the planned twelve-month programme had begun at the Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center.

The statement, reported by PTI on 11 February 2020, said the four would study the systems of the Soyuz crew ship in detail and practise short spells of weightlessness aboard an Il-76MDK aircraft flown for the purpose. They would also learn how to act correctly after an abnormal landing of the descent module in different climates and terrain.

The pandemic interrupted this. Dr Jitendra Singh told the Lok Sabha on 10 February 2021 that training at the centre was halted from 28 March to 11 May 2020 under Russian health rules and resumed on 12 May 2020. In January 2020 he had said that after Russia the four would receive training specific to the crew and service module designed by ISRO, learning to operate it and working through simulations.

That second phase took place at ISRO’s Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru, which covers classroom teaching, physical fitness, simulator work and flight suit training. The modules include flight systems, weightlessness familiarisation through parabolic flights, aero-medical training, recovery and survival training, and yoga. ThePrint reported that the four were also taking an M.Tech degree at the Indian Institute of Science.

What the four will actually ride

The launch vehicle is LVM3, the heavy rocket ISRO already flies, with every system reconfigured to meet human-rating requirements and renamed HLVM3. A solid stage, a liquid stage and a cryogenic stage sit below a Crew Escape System, a set of quick-acting solid motors that pull the crew module clear if something fails on the pad or during ascent.

The crew module and the service module together make up the orbital module. The crew module is double-walled, with a pressurised metal inner shell and an outer structure carrying the thermal protection, and it houses the life support system. The stated aim is to launch three crew members to 400 kilometres for three days and bring them down in Indian sea waters.

By 6 August 2026, according to the PIB’s account of Dr Jitendra Singh’s reply in the Rajya Sabha, HLVM3 had completed development and ground testing of all its propulsion stages and structures. All five types of Crew Escape System motors had been developed and static tested. The Orbital Module Preparation Facility, the Gaganyaan Control Centre, the Crew Training Facility and the modifications to the Second Launch Pad were in place. The same release names four partners: the European Space Agency for network operations, the Australian Space Agency for recovering crew and capsule, France’s CNES for training flight surgeons, and Roscosmos for astronaut training and critical systems.

The PIB’s account of the Prime Minister’s February 2024 briefing says he was pleased that most of the equipment in Gaganyaan is Made in India. The Cabinet approved ₹20,193 crore in September 2024 for eight missions under the human spaceflight programme, the August 2026 release adds. It says the programme leads into a longer plan: the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, with five modules, is to be operational by 2035, and the government has approved development and launch of the first module, BAS-01. The 2018 Cabinet note had said the flight systems would be realised through industry, and the wider commercial side of the sector is covered in our piece on India’s NewSpace start-ups. How ISRO has made hard missions affordable is told in the story of Mars, the Moon and the 104-satellite launch.

Ten o’clock, 21 October 2023

The first flight test of Gaganyaan hardware had a false start. The test vehicle, a single-engine rocket carrying an early, unpressurised crew module, was set to go at 8:00 on the morning of 21 October 2023 from Sriharikota. Weather pushed it back 45 minutes. The countdown then reached five seconds before liftoff, and the automatic launch sequence stopped it.

Chairman S. Somanath later called the cause a “monitoring anomaly.” ISRO posted: “Reason for the launch hold is identified and corrected. The launch is planned at 10:00 Hrs. today.” It lifted off at that time.

The mission page on ISRO’s website gives the sequence. The vehicle reached Mach 1.2 at 11.7 kilometres, where the abort was demonstrated. The crew module separated from the escape system at 17 kilometres, the drogue parachute opened at 16.7 kilometres and the main parachute opened below 2.5 kilometres. The module weighed 4,520 kilograms and used ten parachutes. Landing was in the sea, and the Indian Navy recovered the module. The flight’s official name is “In-flight Abort Demonstration of Crew Escape System.”

Dropping a capsule from a Chinook

ISRO ran the first Integrated Air Drop Test, IADT-01, at Sriharikota on 24 August 2025. An Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter lifted a simulated crew module of about 4.8 tonnes to roughly 3 kilometres and released it. Ten parachutes of four types opened in a fixed order: two small ones that slow the separated apex cover, two drogue parachutes, three pilot parachutes and three main parachutes, each main one 25 metres across. They brought the module’s speed down to about 8 metres a second at touchdown. The Navy ship INS Anvesha carried the recovered module to Chennai port.

The test simulated a possible abort on the launch pad, ISRO says. Before the real drop, the team ran multiple trial sorties with dummy hardware and the Chinook, and a Test Authorisation Board cleared the test. The Air Force, the Navy, the Coast Guard and DRDO, the defence research organisation, all contributed.

The second test, IADT-02, took place on 10 April 2026. This time the dummy module weighed about 5.7 tonnes, which ISRO says equals the mass of the crew module on the first uncrewed Gaganyaan flight, known as G1. Lifted by a Chinook to about 3 kilometres, it fell into the sea near Sriharikota under ten parachutes and was recovered with the Navy. In ISRO’s words the test is “another significant step towards the readiness” for G1.

The pilot who got to orbit first

One of the four flew before the rest. Shubhanshu Shukla, by then a Group Captain according to the PIB, was pilot of the private Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station. The mission launched on 25 June 2025 aboard a SpaceX Dragon, with an international crew led by Peggy Whitson of the United States and including astronauts from Poland and Hungary.

The agency’s account calls it an 18-day mission aboard the station. Shukla completed seven experiments from Indian institutions, coordinated by ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre: algae growth, muscle regeneration, sprouting of methi and moong, tardigrade survival, cognitive tests on electronic displays, cyanobacteria and seeds. He spoke live with Modi from the station on 28 June 2025, and joined amateur radio sessions with students in Bengaluru and in northeast India on 4 and 8 July.

The Dragon capsule splashed down off California at about 3:03 pm Indian time on 15 July 2025. A mission operations team from ISRO went to Houston as well and sat alongside NASA and Axiom flight controllers, which the agency describes as first-hand experience in running human spaceflight operations.

Where the programme stands in October 2026

Every 2026 statement found describes the first uncrewed flight, G1, as still to come. Dr Jitendra Singh told the Rajya Sabha on 6 August 2026 that the first uncrewed mission, carrying the half-humanoid robot Vyommitra, was “targeted during the fourth quarter of 2026.” Two more uncrewed missions in the configuration of the first crewed flight would follow, “targeted by 2027.” Activities for the next test vehicle mission, TV-D2, were in progress.

At National Space Day in Ahmedabad on 23 August 2026, ISRO chairman V. Narayanan said, according to NDTV: “Eight thousand tests are successfully completed till today and we are in the final leg.” He added that three uncrewed missions would precede the crewed one and that the first would fly this year.

ETV Bharat quoted Narayanan on the sequence on 11 September 2026. The first uncrewed craft would go at the end of December, the second six months later and the third six months after that, and humans would fly “in December 2027 or early 2028.”

Dates have moved before. The 2018 Cabinet note set a first crewed flight 40 months after sanction. In February 2021 the space minister told the Lok Sabha the first uncrewed mission was planned for December 2021. ThePrint wrote in February 2024 that the crewed launch was projected for 2025. The PIB’s June 2025 explainer put the first human spaceflight in the first quarter of 2027. Angad Pratap, one of the four, addressed the slips on 9 September 2026 at the Bengaluru Space Expo. “When you become an astronaut, you have to start living with this fact that there are going to be delays in prototype programmes, especially,” he told reporters, according to PTI.

The most recent statement found is from 5 October 2026. Narayanan Appu, director of the ISRO Propulsion Complex at Mahendragiri, told reporters in Coimbatore that about 95 percent of the initial-phase tests were complete, that G1 was planned by the end of this year with G2 and G3 at six-month intervals, and that human spaceflight was targeted for mid-2028.