The French space agency CNES has offered to share knowledge gained from sending 10 astronauts to space with the Indian space agency ISRO as it attempts to meet the 2022 target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the first exclusively Indian human space flight.
CNES president Jean Yves Le Gall offered to share French expertise in human space flights with ISRO after announcement of the creation of an Indo-French working group to facilitate the first Indian human space flight at ISRO’s Bangalore Space Exposition Thursday.
“CNES is especially proud to be working on this endeavour alongside ISRO to share the experience it has acquired from the first French human spaceflights to Thomas Pesquet’s Proxima mission, and to hone our own expertise by learning from ISRO’s innovative developments in the field of crew transport,” Le Gall said.
The CNES and ISRO will collaborate in the areas of space medicine, astronaut health monitoring, life support, radiation protection, space debris protection and personal hygiene systems, French officials said.
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“Engineering teams have already begun discussions and it is envisioned that infrastructure such as the CADMOS centre for the development of microgravity applications and space operations or the MEDES space clinic will be used for training of future Indian astronauts, as well as exchange of specialist personnel,” an official communique on behalf of CNES stated.
ISRO Chairman K Sivan said ISRO’s main focus over the next four years would be the human space flight endeavour or the Gaganyaan programme and that “private industry will need to play a much larger role in the production and development of launch vehicles and satellites”.