India introduces four-member crew for its Gaganyaan space mission

India on Tuesday announced the team of four military pilots who will travel on the country’s first crewed mission to space.

The Gaganyaan Mission, or “Sky Craft” in Hindi, aims to launch the astronauts to an orbit of 400km as part of a three-day mission.

The four officers are Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan, Angad Pratap and Shubhanshu Shukla, a government statement said.

The officers were selected after extensive physical and psychological tests from a pool of Indian Air Force pilots.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi awarded the four crew members “astronaut wings” at a space centre in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, southern India.

“These are not just four names or four people. These are four powers who will take the aspirations of 140 crore [1.4 billion] Indians to space,” Mr Modi said.

“Forty years later, an Indian is going to space. But this time, the timing, the countdown and the rocket belong to us,” he added, referring to Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma who went to space in 1984 as part of a Soviet mission.

The Gaganyaan mission will cost India about 90.23 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) and will involve the launch of a habitable space capsule which will return via a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The mission would make India, which has become a global pioneer in low-cost launches, only the fourth nation to send a crewed mission into space using a domestically built rocket, after the US, Russia and China.

The Indian Space Research Organisation will conduct 20 major tests on the spacecraft before launching humans into space, including sending up three uncrewed missions.

One of the flights will include launching Vyommitra, a robot astronaut, this year.

India is emerging as a leading space nation, having reached Mars in 2014. It also became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the unexplored south pole of the Moon in August last year.

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Sinopharm vaccine explained

The Sinopharm vaccine was created using techniques that have been around for decades.

“This is an inactivated vaccine. Simply what it means is that the virus is taken, cultured and inactivated," said Dr Nawal Al Kaabi, chair of the UAE's National Covid-19 Clinical Management Committee.

"What is left is a skeleton of the virus so it looks like a virus, but it is not live."

This is then injected into the body.

"The body will recognise it and form antibodies but because it is inactive, we will need more than one dose. The body will not develop immunity with one dose," she said.

"You have to be exposed more than one time to what we call the antigen."

The vaccine should offer protection for at least months, but no one knows how long beyond that.

Dr Al Kaabi said early vaccine volunteers in China were given shots last spring and still have antibodies today.

“Since it is inactivated, it will not last forever," she said.

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