India planning to set up its own space station, says ISRO chief

India plans to have its own little house in outer space in the next few years. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairperson K. Sivan on Thursday announced that after Gaganyaan, India's ambitious human space flight mission, the country would work for establishing its own space station. “We are looking at a small module, with a mass of around 20 tonnes,'' he said. 

Sivan said that India would continue its human space programme beyond Gaganyaan. Apart from the planned space station, India would also continuously train astronauts to join the international community for going to the moon. 

The chairperson did not say how much a space station will cost. He said that the idea was in a nascent stage and that after the first phase of Gaganyaan, they will submit the plan of the space station mission. Gaganyaan will consist of three flights, two without humans and the first with three astronauts in space for around a week. 

The space station is certainly a very ambitious idea; it will require not only pots of money, but also some very skillful technology. There have been 11 space stations since the 1970s, most of them Soviet or American. At present, there are two functional space stations, the International Space Station (ISS), which is a large, collaborative platform for many space agencies including NASA, Roscosmos, European and Japanese, and China's Tiangong 2, or Heavenly Palace. While the ISS is permanently occupied, China's space station is only intermittently occupied. 

Sources say that the space station will help conduct microgravity experiments. 

Sivan also announced the launch window of Aditya, a mission to study the solar corona. It will be in the first half of 2020.