HOW I TRAINED TO GO TO SPACE

Prepping with Rakesh Sharma and others

- WING COMMANDER YOGESH SURI (RETD)

Four gaganauts have recently been chosen for India’s manned space mission next year. My congratulations to Group Captains Prashanth Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla for their selection. This is just the beginning. India is now in the process of selecting and setting up training facilities for a core of gaganauts to man our future ventures in space.

For India, human space flight is still uncharted territory. Apart from Kalpana Chawla with NASA, the only other Indian to have gone up is Rakesh Sharma, but that was courtesy the Russians and their experience in the field. Very soon, we will boast of sending our people with our own technology.

Reading about the four gaganauts reminds me of the days that I was associated with the selection process for the first Indians in space. We started with 52 pilots, of which four were shortlisted. There were two wing commanders, Ravish Malhotra and S.C. Mittal, and two squadron leaders, Rakesh Sharma and myself.

This would be further cut to two pilots, who would undergo full training in Russia. But, some aspects of training started before that final cut. We sat through Russian language classes, while our physical and medical evaluation was in progress. After coming back from the evaluation in Moscow, the four of us were put through some lectures by ISRO to familiarise us with outer space.