Colonisation of moon?

BENGALURU: India's human space programme (Gaganyaan), which had gained some pace in the last part of the previous decade took a major step back after the failures of GSLV in 2010, Air Vice Marshal Pankaj Tyagi (retd), former commandant of Institute of Aerospace Medicine (IAM) said on Saturday.In 2006, it was planned to build a crew vehicle that can accommodate two to three astronauts and human rate Isro 's GSLV MK-II or MK-III, he said, adding that the government even sanctioned Rs 95 crore to study all aspects of the human space mission.Today, there is a gap between projections made by Isro and actual realisation, which must be matched by working together, he said adding that the IAM was completely left out of the loop post 2010, which has led to these problems."By 2007, Isro conducted the SRE (space recovery experiment) and it had planned to have SRE-2, which was never realised after the failures of GSLV in 2010," Tyagi said, while delivering the MM Srinagesh Memorial Oration here.He said that the IAM had begun a lot of work on the human space programme as we even had an MoU with Isro. But after the GSLV failures, there was a lull, which has created several gaps across various engineering aspects as all of them need to be human rated and the role of IAM was critical."...Two failures of GSLV and IAM went out of focus of the stakeholders as a vital resource for planning and execution of human space programme, Why didn't the space programme management group ask IAM to continue to walk with Isro in the preparations for human rating of the systems while they rectified the fault lines in the launch platform," Tyagi said.This he said has resulted in multiple gaps that now need to be addressed if the programme was to be successful. "It will happen. We have a strong political leadership and all the technical capabilities, but we need to work together to achieve this. The progress claimed to be made by Isro in number of human related areas needs to be shared and integrated completely with the IAM and aerospace community for the success of the programme," he added.On why the IAM was left out after 2010, he said: "Once they felt that they didn't have a launch vehicle (after the GSLV failures) it demoralised them and everything took a step back and they began working in isolation. But we continued with our which, which will today aid in executing the programme."He further said that the capabilities developed by the IAM will save the human space programme at least Rs 500 crore to Rs 1,000 crore. He added that in the future there needs to be enough funding to make the human space programme a sustainable one."It shouldn't become a one or two mission programme, we need to have a sustained human programme. The Chinese have set a goal to colonise Moon by 2030, the US will soon have people on Mars, and if India needs to have a say in future space policies and stake its claim rightfully, it cannot be left behind in any of these aspects and sending people to space is the way forward," he said.