The first unmanned space flight of India's Gaganyaan project, which hopes to take Indian astronauts to space in the coming years, has been postponed until 2021 due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, a senior Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) official told the Times of India newspaper on Thursday
NEW DELHI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2020) The first unmanned space flight of India's Gaganyaan project, which hopes to take Indian astronauts to space in the coming years, has been postponed until 2021 due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, a senior Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) official told the Times of India newspaper on Thursday.
"With the present conditions, the unmanned flight may not be possible this year. We are planning about five to six missions, including the GiSAT-1 [satellite], whose launch was postponed earlier this year. The details of these missions will be made public later," ISRO Chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan said, as quoted by the newspaper.
According to Sivan, a humanoid robot will be on board two scheduled unmanned launches before the first manned missions take place, the newspaper reported.
Additionally, the Chandrayaan-3 project, which will be the ISRO's third mission to land a probe on the moon, will have its launch date pushed back from the original January 2021 date, Sivan told the newspaper.
"The configuration will be the same as Chandrayaan-2. We are working out details of various systems," the ISRO chairman said, as quoted by the newspaper.
In October, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said that there was no traces of India's Vikram lunar lander, which was part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, on the moon. The ISRO had said in September that the Vikram launcher had made a hard landing on the moon's surface before contact with the machine was lost.
