Gaganyaan in November 2026: what has flown, what has not, and when India’s astronauts might launch
No launch date has been announced yet. Here is where India’s human spaceflight programme stands, who the astronauts are, what the first flights will do, and why the date keeps moving.
As of 10 November 2026, Gaganyaan has not flown. ISRO’s target for its first uncrewed orbital flight, called G1, is the October-to-December quarter of 2026. ISRO chairman V. Narayanan said in September that it would fly within the year, but no launch date has been announced. The first flight with Indian astronauts aboard is targeted for 2027, after further uncrewed flights.
When will Gaganyaan launch?
The honest answer is: the uncrewed G1 flight could come before the end of 2026, but no date is fixed, and the date has moved many times. When the Prime Minister announced the programme on Independence Day in 2018, the aim was to fly Indians by 2022, the 75th year of independence. The first uncrewed flight was then planned for December 2020. The pandemic, the work of making every system safe for people, and a long list of qualification tests pushed it back, first to 2024 and 2025, and then to the end of 2026.
In June 2026 Narayanan put G1 in the last quarter of the year. In September he said it would fly within the year. In October ISRO completed ground tests of the separation between the crew module and the service module, one of the last major checks before flight, according to reporting by The Week. The first crewed mission is targeted for 2027.
What has been tested so far
- 21 October 2023, TV-D1: a test vehicle flight from Sriharikota proved the crew escape system, which must pull the crew away from a failing rocket. The crew module splashed down in the Bay of Bengal and was recovered by the Navy.
- 24 August 2025, first integrated air drop test: a crew module dropped from an aircraft to check the full parachute sequence.
- 10 April 2026, second integrated air drop test: an Indian Air Force Chinook released a test capsule from about 3 km to check the parachutes again.
- 2026, Vyommitra: the robot that will ride G1 was integrated into the flight crew module. It will report how the cabin’s life support and environment behave.
- October 2026: ground tests of crew module and service module separation at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram.
Who are India’s Gaganyaan astronauts?
The four astronaut-designates were named by the Prime Minister on 27 February 2024 at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. All are Indian Air Force test pilots: Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla. They trained in Russia and India.
One of them has already been to orbit. Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot of Axiom Mission 4, a private mission to the International Space Station, launching from Florida on 25 June 2025 and returning on 15 July after about 18 days aboard the station. That made him the first Indian on the ISS and the second Indian in space, after Rakesh Sharma flew on a Soviet Soyuz in April 1984. Prasanth Nair trained as his backup. Shukla’s farewell from the station echoed Sharma’s famous answer from 1984; we tell that story in our piece on what India looks like from the space station.
What will the first crewed flight do?
ISRO describes the programme’s goal as a three-day mission for a crew of three in a 400 km orbit, ending with the crew module splashing down under parachutes in Indian waters. The capsule and its service module ride to orbit on HLVM3 from Sriharikota. ISRO has not yet announced which astronauts will fly first.
What a 400 km orbit means: our calculation
At 400 km above the ground, a spacecraft must travel at about 7.67 km per second, roughly 27,600 km/h, to stay in orbit. One lap of Earth takes about 92 minutes, so a crew would see about 15 or 16 sunrises a day and complete about 46 orbits in three days. From that height the horizon is about 2,200 km away in every direction, enough to take in most of India in a single view whenever the orbit passes over it.
Why does the date keep moving?
Crewed flight leaves far less room for error than a satellite launch. Every part of the rocket and capsule has to be qualified to human-rating standards, and the crew escape system, parachutes and life support each have their own test campaigns, which run in sequence: a failure or an anomaly in one sends engineers back before the next can begin. ISRO has said repeatedly that it will fly when the tests are complete rather than to a calendar. ISRO’s plan calls for further abort tests and more uncrewed orbital flights before astronauts board.
Why Gaganyaan matters
If it succeeds, India will be the fourth country to launch people into orbit on its own rocket, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. The September 2024 Cabinet decision tied Gaganyaan to a larger plan: eight missions by December 2028, including the first module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, a station operating by 2035 and an Indian crewed landing on the Moon by 2040. The same programme depends on ISRO’s launch infrastructure, which is growing with a second spaceport in Tamil Nadu.
How we worked this out
Mission goals, test dates and budget figures come from ISRO and from the Government of India’s September 2024 Cabinet decision. The October 2026 status is from reporting by The Week, and statements by the ISRO chairman were widely reported at the time. The orbital speed and period are our calculation for a circular orbit at 400 km, using Earth’s standard gravitational parameter and a mean radius of 6,371 km. We have not given a launch date because none has been announced; we will update this story when one is.
Sources
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