Gaganyaan-4

Gaganyaan-4 also named as H1 will be the first crewed test flight of the Gaganyaan programme, with launch planned for 2027.

Mission

The mission is planned to demonstrate human spaceflight capability by sending a crew to an orbit of 400 km of altitude for 7 days. Reporting in January 2020 for the Hindustan Times, Anonna Dutt quotes K. Sivan, then chairman of ISRO, as saying,
In October 2023, it was announced that the first crewed flight would take place after three uncrewed missions of the human-rated HLVM3. The launch is planned for 2027 with the capsule coming down in the Indian Ocean.

Crew

The Gaganyan programme astronauts, Prasanth Nair, Angad Pratap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubhanshu Shukla, were announced on 27 February 2024. Those selected for the first spaceflight will be from this pool of qualified astronauts, and one of them, Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the ISS in 2025 on Axiom Mission 4 with Prasanth Nair as his backup. It is considered that one or two crewmembers will take part of this mission, with one being Shukla due to his flight experience.

Future international collaboration

ISRO, the Department of Space and the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center, together with Voyager Space, agreed to a memorandum of understanding to explore the use of Gaganyaan for crew transportation to Voyager's planned Starlab space station.