Scroll down to follow Gaganyaan's journey — from a bold idea to the launch pad. Milestones marked in green are planned and subject to change.
Rakesh Sharma flies to the Salyut 7 station aboard Soviet Soyuz T-11 — India's first taste of human spaceflight.
ISRO launches and recovers the SRE-1 capsule from orbit, proving re-entry, heat-shield and splashdown-recovery basics.
A boilerplate crew module rides an LVM3-X to 126 km, re-enters at high speed and parachutes into the Bay of Bengal.
The Crew Escape System yanks a test capsule from the launch pad to 2.75 km and a safe sea landing in 259 seconds.
PM Narendra Modi announces from the Red Fort that India will send its own astronauts to space. Cabinet approval and ₹10,000 crore follow in December.
Four IAF test pilots complete generic spaceflight training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow.
The first Test Vehicle mission demonstrates the Crew Escape System in flight — the capsule separates, descends under parachutes and is recovered from the Bay of Bengal.
The four astronaut-designates are revealed to the world; the CE-20 cryogenic engine also earns its human-rating certification this month.
The Cabinet approves the Bharatiya Antariksh Station's first module and more flights, raising the Gaganyaan budget to ₹20,193 crore.
Gaganyatri Shubhanshu Shukla pilots Axiom Mission 4 and spends 18 days on the International Space Station — a first for India.
Integrated Air Drop Tests (Aug 2025 & Apr 2026) prove the full parachute system; sea-recovery and crew-egress trials wrap up; Vyommitra integration begins for the first orbital flight.
ISRO ground-fires the solid motor of SOLVE (Sub-Orbital Launch Vehicle for Experiments), a compact rocket built from modified PSLV booster technology to run further parachute-recovery trials for the crew module.
ISRO completes float-inflation testing of the Crew Module Uprighting System (which turns the capsule upright after splashdown), plus umbilical-separation and apex-cover-separation tests — each validating a distinct life-critical step in the descent and recovery sequence.
ISRO details plans for "Gaganyaan Nivas", an astronaut isolation and training facility at Sriharikota, so future gaganyatris can train and quarantine in India rather than travel abroad — part of a longer-term plan to widen the astronaut corps beyond IAF test pilots.
During a CE-20 engine hot test, ISRO successfully demonstrates the LOX Tank Pressurization Module intended for the C32 cryogenic stages of Gaganyaan's human-rated launch vehicle.
The complete spacecraft flies to orbit on the HLVM3 with the robot Vyommitra aboard — no humans, full dress rehearsal. Two more uncrewed flights (G2, G3) follow before the crewed mission.
Gaganyatris orbit Earth at 400 km on an Indian rocket — making India the fourth nation to launch humans to space on its own.
The Bharatiya Antariksh Station is targeted for completion by 2035 — and an Indian on the Moon by 2040.