5 Reasons Why ISRO's Gaganyaan Mission Will Make All Of Us Proud

India is just stepping into a new age of space exploration. With the confirmation of a budget for the first manned flight to the Moon, comes excitement, anticipation, and a whole lot of work for the Indian Space Research Organisation. And frankly, all of us should be proud.

Sheer audacity of the mission

The Gaganyaan mission, as it's called, will launch from the Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh sometime in 2022. It will carry a three-man team of "Vyomnauts" into low-earth orbit, where they will stay for at least a week, and then return them to Earth for debriefing. The mission will use India's GSLV Mk III three-stage rocket and will be a collaborative effort between ISRO and other national agencies.

Also Read: ISRO Is Launching A Satellite To Venus In 2023, And Is Inviting Payloads From Other Countries

It'll put ISRO into an exclusive club

If this mission succeeds, India will join an exclusive group of countries that have put humans into space. We'll be just the fourth behind Russia, the US, and China. However, that also means there's a more limited pool of experience to draw from. Aside from how how hard it is just making a rocket that's stable enough to reach space and back, it's not exactly safe for astronauts out there either.

For one thing, our Vyomnauts are going to have to keep exercised during their week in orbit. It'll also be their first experience in near-isolation, unless ISRO puts them through that training on land first. If there's some sort of freak medical emergency, the crew will have to somehow manage with their joint medical knowledge. Frankly, being the first makes them brave as hell.

It's really hecking cheap

When India launched it's Mangalyaan mission back in 2013, people across the world sat up and took notice. That's because ISRO managed to launch the satellite with a shoestring budget of Rs 450 crore (about $74 million). Compared to NASA's own Mars orbiter mission, which cost them around $672 million, and it's clear just how far Indian jugaad can stretch.

Gaganyaan will receive the same treatment, with the manned mission expected to cost around Rs 10,000 crore, or $1.4 billion. That's less than some Hollywood movie budgets, and we're going to stretch that to send our countrymen into space.

A lot of Indian indigenous tech

In order for ISRO to keep the budget as tight as possible, it'll have to repeat what it did with Mangalyaan. A big part of that was sourcing materials and components locally, and developing every inch of the rocket's hardware and software internals from scratch. For another, ISRO made sure to pack lightly. It was able to send a smaller satellite to Mars by reducing some of its capabilities. What they did then, was pick and choose certain avenues of research their orbiter could explore, which would complement research conducted by other space-faring nations. So you can expect ISRO will be building as light as possible.

India's first big step into the dark unknown

The Gaganyaan mission, while a milestone in our spacefaring history, is obviously not the endgame for ISRO. What we want to do, is gaining comfort and experience launching humans to space, so we can one day get them to the Moon, Mars, and who knows how much further. To that end, it might even be possible for us to catch up to others doing the same.

So far, NASA is already on course to get their astronauts to Mars by 2020, though they're currently not planning a return to the Moon. SpaceX, if they can for once keep to their rocket building schedule, hope to send a manned mission to Mars by 2024 and even colonise the planet. Jeff Bezos meanwhile wants to use Blue Origin to send a manned ship to the Moon instead, again by 2020. He believes that's humanity's next expansion plan.

Either way, ISRO has rarely delayed on launch plans. So if they can send a manned mission to orbit on two years, we might actually get to the Moon by 2024, and soon after to Mars. It'll just take a little money (very little), a lot of hard work, and a whole lot of luck.