India to get its own astronauts' training facility, soon

Tentatively named Astronaut Training and Biomedical Engineering Centre, for building this facility, the Indian Air Force's Institute of Aviation Medicine (IAM) also pitched in.

The facility, however, will not be able to train any astronaut for India's first space mission since it'll be in 2022, and that's a tight schedule, confirmed ISRO Chairman Sivan K.

They will be trained either in Russia or US.

The facility will be built on the lines of the training center in Russia (the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center), said officials.

It will train astronauts for surviving in a zero-gravity environment, the most challenging part, as per Rakesh Sharma, India's first astronaut, who flew aboard Soviet spacecraft Salyut 7 in 1984.

Training for future manned missions, radiation environment, etc will also be imparted.

Apart from this, there will be water simulators.

"Astronauts will go underneath the water and learn to live in zero gravity situations," said an official in the know.

Other chambers will be there for thermal cycling and radiation regulation. There will also be centrifugals, where astronauts will get trained on acceleration aspects when their module or vehicle is in space.

The first task for IAM is, however, selecting astronauts or Gaganauts (as Modi addressed it to be) for the 2022 mission.

For conducting the selection-tests, the facility already has necessary simulators and for training them on Gforce, there is the centrifugal system, said officials.

Within a year, selection will be done and then training will be imparted, to prepare the astronauts before the mission.