Speaking in Coimbatore on September 18, 2025, ISRO chairman Dr. V Narayanan stated that roughly 85% of the research needed for India’s first human spaceflight program, Gaganyaan, had been finished.
He emphasized that the mission continues to be ISRO’s top priority and that key technical systems, including abort demonstration sequences, life-support architecture, heat-shield testing, and crew module validation, are getting close to complete readiness.
Vyommitra, the AI-enabled humanoid robot, is slated to fly before the end of this year as part of a crew-environment simulation experiment. The program will advance progressively through a series of unmanned missions, with the first one taking place in December 2025.
In keeping with accelerated timeframes for human-rated launch vehicles and deep space habitation systems, Narayanan emphasized that Gaganyaan will serve as a model for future ambitious projects, announcing for the first time that ISRO intends to send an Indian crewed trip to the Moon by March 2027.
In order to further autonomous operations on alien surfaces, the Moon program will build on concurrent developments from Chandrayaan-4, which intends to integrate Vyommitra into its lunar sample retrieval mission.
With cutting-edge high-resolution cameras and geophysical instruments prepared to be incorporated into the lunar missions, ISRO’s imaging and sensor capabilities are among the greatest in the world, the chairman emphasized.
He emphasized how artificial intelligence is becoming more and more integrated into ISRO’s research and development, both in spacecraft autonomy and mission planning, allowing for longer missions without constant Earth-based assistance.
Before the last crewed missions, the roadmap also calls for two further unmanned launches after December to test the systems for human spaceflight.
The remaining 15% of research is moving quickly, Narayanan emphasized, with enhanced docking systems, life-support sustainability for interplanetary travel, and crew safety redundancies being the main areas of attention.
Using both domestic ingenuity and cutting-edge AI-enabled space robotics, the announcement places India as just the fourth country with near-term capabilities for crewed lunar exploration.
