India will send an astronaut into space by 2022, the country’s prime minister has claimed during an annual independence day speech.
Narendra Modi announced the target from the ramparts of the 370-year-old Red Fort in Delhi on Wednesday morning. “We have decided that by 2022, when India completes 75 years of independence, or before that, a son or daughter of India will go to space with a tricolour [Indian flag] in their hands,” he said.
Modi also set a 25 September launch date for a national medical insurance scheme, dubbed “Modicare”, and defended his government’s record, in his last independence day address before general elections expected early next year.
If successful, India would be the fourth country in the world to conduct a manned space mission, after the US, China and Russia.
The chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) confirmed the timeline and said the pilots and crew, often called vyomanauts – derived from vyom, the Sanskrit word for space – would spend at least seven days in space.
“[The] PM has given the target of 2022 and it’s our duty to meet it,” Kailasavadivoo Sivan said. “We have completed many technologies like crew module and escape systems. The project has been under way; now we need to prioritise and achieve the target.”
He said the mission, first proposed nearly a decade ago, would cost the famously frugal space agency less than £1.1bn. It would be proceeded by two unmanned expeditions, the first of which would launch in 2020.
The target echoed that set by John F Kennedy in 1961 to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade.
Nasa succeeded more than eight years later, reporting the overall cost of the Apollo programme at about $25.4bn in 1973 dollars – about $147bn today.
India’s space programme was established in 1962 and launched its first lunar probe a decade ago. In September 2014, Isro successfully guided a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, just the fourth space programme in the world to do so.
The Mars mission cost about $73m, nearly a 10th of the cost of a Nasa probe sent to orbit the planet the previous year. The discrepancy has led Modi to frequently joke that India can launch satellites into space for less money than it cost to make the Hollywood film Gravity.
The former air force pilot Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to go to space, in 1984 as part of a Soviet mission. Several astronauts of Indian origin have been part of Nasa missions, including Kalpana Chawla, who died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion.
The development and early years of India’s space programme were personally overseen by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, who saw an affinity between scientific advancement and the secular, rational worldview he hoped would take root in the new country.