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Notably, India has the highest number of female pilots in the world. As per the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Indian female pilots make up 14% of its pilot workforce, compared to a global average of 6%. That's not all. IAF started inducting female pilots in non-combat roles more than 30 years ago in 1993, while combat role recruitments began in 2016.
Of the women firsts from Russia in 1963 (Valentina Tereshkova, an engineer), the US in 1983 (Sally Ride, a physicist) and China in 2012 (Liu Yang, a military transport pilot), none were combat pilots, and Tereshkova and Ride weren't pilots at all. Women firsts in space from Japan and France - Chiaki Mukai in 1994 and Claudie Haignere in 1996 - are both physicians.
Technological advancements and emergence of space tourism has made commercial space-flight routine. Last month, the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft flew Roscosmos and Belarusian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Marina Vasilevskaya, and Nasa astronaut Tracy Dyson to the International Space Station (ISS). Vasilevskaya, a flight attendant for Belavia Airlines, is the first Belarusian to fly into space. She was one of six finalists of a nationwide contest organised by the Belarus Academy of Sciences and Belarus Space Agency where more than 3,000 female candidates applied.
Dyson, in support of her Belarusian crewmate, reportedly remarked that flight attendants don't just serve drinks but are primarily responsible for our personal safety on board the aircraft, are no stranger to emergency situations, and know what to do and how to stay calm when they happen.
In the 1960s, the all-male fighter pilot school of astronaut selection was turned on its head by William Randolph Lovelace, an aerospace physician who served as head of Nasa's Special Committee on Bioastronautics. Lovelace launched a privately-funded Woman in Space Programme that tested 24 female pilots for astronaut fitness, of which 13 made the cut.
The youngest, Wally Funk, was a 23-year-old flight instructor - who, in 2021 at the age of 82, became the oldest person to go to space when she travelled on Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital spacecraft and broke the 23-year record held by John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, who also remains the oldest man to travel to space as a 77-year-old in 1998.
As it happens, this week, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin announced that Florida-based Indian entrepreneur and licensed pilot Gopichand Thotakura will be part of the passenger crew of the next New Shepard space tourism mission. This is welcome news.
Last June, when Narendra Modi visited Washington DC, Joe Biden announced that India and the US will collaborate to send an Indian astronaut to ISS in 2024. We are four months into 2024, and there are murmurs that the flight that Biden promised will likely happen on a private mission run by Axiom Space, and India will probably have to pay for the ride.
Axiom Space is a Houston-based company that operates end-to-end missions to ISS. A commercial provider of human space-flight services, it has flown wealthy civilians as space tourists and newbie astronauts from countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. Axiom is also developing a habitable commercial module for ISS, under contract from Nasa.
So far, three Axiom missions have taken place, with the last flight being this January. Each mission carried a quartet that flew onboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Centre. A quick scan of Axiom's first three missions reveals the crew composition. The mission commander is a retired Nasa astronaut with extensive experience. The rest of the crew can be practically anybody who can pay for the ride, or has a sponsor and can pass basic physiological and psychological tests.
Gaganyaan's first gaganaut selection round was a missed opportunity. India now has a chance to remedy that, and grandly so. Let us make 2024 a historical year for India's human space-flight programme by sending a woman to the orbiting ISS.
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Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the ET ePaper online.