‘In the last 20 years, India has…’: What former NASA astronaut Steve Lee Smith said about the country’s space activities | India News – Times of India

The former Indian President praised India for its achievements in the space sector. NASA astronaut Steve Lee Smith noted that India had achieved feats that no other country had achieved.
“India has been very successful in space in the last 20 years and is highly respected worldwide. Mission Over Mars was the first time that a country ever made a first attempt to orbit Mars. India also landed on the moon last year. In the history of the world, they simply did something that no one else has ever done,” ANI quoted Smith as saying.
Expressing his excitement about India’s future space activities, he said, “And just a few months later, India is preparing its own capsule to send people into space and they have named their astronauts. Hopefully, Indian astronauts will go into space on an Indian spaceship.”
Smith had earlier praised India’s “bold” goals and tireless spirit in achieving its moon mission, Chandrayaan-3, which has put it ahead of space giants including Russia, Japan and the US.
Now NASA is involved in training two Indian astronauts, one of whom will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. Isro Chairman S Somanath had earlier indicated that ISRO was likely to select four astronauts for the training.
India’s planned space station, the Bharatiya Antariksha Station, will be built and operated by ISRO. It is expected to be completed in 2035. The station, smaller than the ISS, will have a mass of 20 tonnes and will be used for microgravity experiments, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of about 400 km.
The Aditya-L1 mission, the spacecraft’s first solar mission, reached a milestone when the Aditya-L1 spacecraft completed its first halo orbit around the Sun-Earth point L1 on July 3.
The Aditya-L1 mission, launched on September 2 last year, is an Indian solar observatory at the Lagrangian point L1. The spacecraft was placed in its intended halo orbit on January 6 and took 178 days to complete one revolution around the L1 point.