India’s world-class facility for training astronauts will come up not in the space headquarters in Bangalore, nor in any glitzy metropolis. It will be established in three years at Challakere, a shrubby, arid oil seeds town on the Bangalore-Pune NH4 in Chitradurga district of Karnataka. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has proposed a ₹2,700-crore master plan to create top infrastructure that will house its young Human Space Flight Centre (HSFC). The 400-acre ISRO land at Challakere will be the single-stop consolidating infrastructure and activities related to space travellers. The first set of four astronaut candidates for the first Gaganyaan mission of 2022 are to train in Russia. The amount sought for the HSFC is over and above the ₹10,000-crore approved budget of Gaganyaan.
