Mission space: Isro to gain immensely from Axiom-4 with Gaganaut experience

Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla’s piloting of the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) will enable India’s first Gaganaut to gain hands-on experience of handling a spacecraft and spending a long sojourn in space. Group Captain Shukla will pilot the Falcon spacecraft, which has been designed and built by SpaceX. Axiom-4, which runs under the aegis of the foundation Axiom Space, features a four-person team from India, Poland, Hungary, and the United States (US). It will carry out over 60 scientific experiments, devised by scientists from 31 countries, including the US, India, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and several European nations. Group Captain Shukla’s experience will provide important data for the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which has its own plans to set up a space station. Indeed, given that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) faces uncertainty about its budgeting during the Donald Trump presidency, Isro may be hoping to pick up the slack when it comes to space exploration.

 

Isro trained Group Captain Shukla for the ISS mission and this is important since it has never run a manned mission (India’s first man in space, back in 1984, was trained in the Soviet cosmonaut programme). India’s agency has ambitious plans for manned missions undertaken on its own, even though it is a Nasa partner and signatory to the Artemis Accords, which enables it to participate in Nasa programmes and missions. Under the Gaganyaan programme, Isro intends to launch a manned spacecraft into orbit as soon as next year if all goes according to schedule. After that, it intends to set up a permanently occupied space station in the low-earth orbit. While Isro has developed many impressive technological capabilities over the decades, manned missions will require it to develop a host of new competencies. There is no error margin since an error could cost lives. 

 

Keeping humans safe, healthy, and sane in space for extended periods and retrieving them safely are tasks many times more difficult than unmanned missions. The hazards include vacuum, high radiation, extreme temperatures, stresses caused by high acceleration and sharp braking, coping with zero gravity and high gravity and so on. Designing space habitats to protect against these is challenging. Research into this has led to enormous advances in medicine and telemedicine. Much more modern gym and hospital equipment has evolved from studying the effects of space on the human body and figuring out how to keep people healthy during long stays in space.

 

One of the experiments Isro designed for Axiom-4 relates to the study of muscle behaviour in space, for example. Another interesting issue is that of diet — while food is carried to the ISS, it is obviously desirable to know how to grow food in zero gravity. On the engineering side, Isro must also learn to design and solve challenges like docking and undocking spacecraft. Humans are carried to a space station, which moves at a speed of about 28,000 km per hour. When they arrive, their craft must synchronise speeds to dock, and it must undock when they leave. Gaganauts must learn how to carry out and oversee such manoeuvres. Isro has already started experimenting with crewless missions, which are testing designs. By debriefing Group Captain Shukla and studying the results of the Axiom-4 experiments, Isro will add considerably to its understanding of what it needs to do to make Gaganyaan a success.