Cooperation With Russia
India and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding on joint activities in the field of human spaceflight programme during the visit of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to India in December 2008.
According to the accord, an Indian cosmonaut will once again be part of a space mission on board a Russian spacecraft. This mission, tentatively scheduled for 2013, will precede a planned Indian manned spaceflight in 2016. This plan was abandoned later in 2010
"As per the agreement, an Indian astronaut will first go on a space mission on a Russian spacecraft. This will be followed by an Indian manned mission to space in 2015," Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair said.
Under the MoU signed by G. Madhavan Nair and his Russian counterpart Anatoly Perminov, ISRO and Russian space agency Roskosmos have revealed that they will jointly build the spacecraft for the Indian manned mission.
"We will be redesigning the Soyuz space capsule of the Russian agency for our mission," Nair said.
ISRO has already been sanctioned ₹95 crore (US$17.3 million) to study all aspects of the manned space mission, which will involve a two-member Indian crew spending a week in space. The spacecraft, to be placed in a low earth orbit, will splashdown in the Indian Ocean after completion of the mission.
ISRO has already announced the setting up of an astronaut training centre in Bangalore. It has now said that a batch of 200 would be initially selected before four are finally shortlisted, of these two would go on the mission.
In 2010 Russia announced that India no longer planned to do a Soyuz mission.
Read more about this topic: Indian Human Spaceflight Program
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