Space the next frontier for human being: Nair

Bangalore, Sep 12: A manned Mission is on the top of the agenda of the long term space programme of the country as space will be the next frontier for human beings, Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman Madhavan Nair said today.

Delivering Air Marshal Subrato Mukherjee Memorial Oration as part of the 54th International Congress of Aviation and Space Medicine here, he said ISRO was debating on how to achieve this big dream as the country needed to do a lot of research in space.

Manned mission is still being debated in the country. ''However, ultimately we have to achieve this as man's presence in space had already been proved to be of great use. Manned Mission will be the final index of development of space technology in India. We are taking space research very seriously,'' he added.

However, the main hurdle in this mission would be the cost factor as it costed in today's calculations upwards of Rs 10,000 crore.

"We can use a combination of sophisticated instruments and robots to do most of the job in space. But we need to put an Indian in space to cap the technological development we have achieved so far, despite being +driven to corner+ due to non availability of foreign technology, in the space technology," he said.

Mr Nair said the ambitious Chandrayaan-I, the moon mission the country had planned to realise in 2008 would be of paramount importance in view of mineral wealth the earth's satellite could offer.

''We are working on sending a totally instrumental satellite to the moon's orbit, about 3.5 lakh km away, mainly to look at the Moon's surface in detail and explore the mineral wealth that the earth's satellite could offer us. We are looking at Helium-3 that could be brought to earth to be used in our nuclear reactors as fuel. The design part of the spacecraft is complete and the launch is fixed for 2008," he said.

On aerospace medicine, he said the major challenge would be to study and find solutions of problems that could arise in cardiovascular system of the astronaut and the changes in the gravity flow of fluids in the human body when he was on a voyage to space. Lots of physiological and psychological aspects were involved in this and aerospace medicine was of critical importance in space missions, he said.

"The first two days in space can create havoc on a human body.

Mitigation study revealed that bone marrow declined and there will be muscle degradation. Heavy radiation conditions will be the other important aspect that had to be overcome. Health maintenance of space crew, managing the health in terms of food nutrition, oxygen supply and other critical matters are the main factors. Aerospace medicine can revolutionise the maintenance of support system of a human being in space," he said.

UNI