India Will Launch A Creepy Female Robot Into Space

So far, only three nations have managed to independently launch a human being into space: the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China. It’s a safe bet to say that the next country to achieve this milestone will be India, who have been developing their Gaganyaan crew capsule since 2006. It was recently announced that an uncrewed Gaganyaan misson will be launched later this year that will include a humanoid robot named Vyommitra, which is Sanskrit for “space friend.” She looks kinda creepy, but she’ll be performing all sorts of important tasks and gathering lots of data required for the first actually crewed mission, scheduled for 2025.

I should note that the calling this robot “creepy” is my own personal opinion and one not shared by media outlets like The Register, who published this (I think) unintentionally hilarious picture-and-caption combo:

I think as soon as you have to tell people something isn’t “creepy or unsettling” in the caption of a picture of that something, you’ve already lost.

Creepy and unsettling or not, this female-coded robot is going to be a crucial step forward for India’s plan to put people into orbit. The robot will simulate the demands of human astronauts to test Gaganyaan’s life support systems; the test Gaganyaan capsule has already had missions to confirm its launch escape system, and the launch vehicle, LVM3, has been human-rated. Interestingly, there is no global standard for what defines a “human-rated” rocket; each space agency decides their own criteria for what makes a rocket human rated.

The robot speaks both Hindi and English, and is legless, similar to the design of Robonaut2, the GM-NASA joint venture that put a humanoid robot on the ISS.

The Gaganyaan spacecraft, in case you’re unfamiliar, was designed to be a simple but modern orbital spacecraft. Like the old American Apollo spacecraft and the new Orion spacecraft, and, oh yeah, even the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, Gaganyaan is a two-module craft, with a crew module and a service module. This is a somewhat different approach than the long-serving Soviet/Russian Soyuz spacecraft or the Chinese Shenzou spacecraft, which both use a three-module system, including an orbital module in addition to a re-entry module and a service module.

India’s science and technology minister Jitendra Singh has said that a crewed Gaganyaan mission will be launched next year, with plans to launch three astronauts into a 250-mile high orbit and return them via a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Will the crewed launch actually happen next year? Space milestones are notorious for getting pushed, but I still think India is on track to be the fourth country to launch a human into space. And, I guess, the first to launch a sorta-creepy fembot.

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