Friday, August 17, 2018

PM Modi Announces Indian Manned Spaceflight Attempt in 2022

As part of his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Modi announced India will attempt their first manned spaceflight in 2022. There is almost no detail about what is planned. We can make some conjectures though.

We know based on their recent pad abort test that India will be using a more tradition capsule. This will be like most of the current spacefaring nations, the current Russian Soyuz (and dubiously coming Federation), the coming American Orion, Starliner and Dragon and the Chinese Shenzhou. The outliers are the American DreamChaser and the possible Chinese spaceplane coming circa 2022. The capsule will almost certainly launch on the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle III rocket: the initial suborbital test of the rocket carried a test capsule to reentry and recovery technologies.

There's little information on the life support equipment or thruster tests, but given if the Soviet Union and United States of the 1960s could develop this stuff very rapidly, I imagine the rest India hasn't talked about publicly (or I have missed) should be relatively easy to do. India could very well make this deadline.

The bigger problem for India is India: they have a very slow development cycle. The Tejas fighter makes the F-35 development cycle seem speedy. Their indigenous carrier and nuclear sub programs have been going on for 40 years and almost made it to the point of finishing their first examples. If they can cut through the red tape, then India can get this done: they have plenty of very smart people. It's the red tape that seems to be so impressively painful there that will cause them to miss this deadline, not their technical capabilities.

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