NEW DELHI, April 3. /TASS/. In creating its own national spaceship Gaganyaan India turned to the Soyuz family of Russian spacecraft for inspiration, the first Indian cosmonaut, Hero of the Soviet Union Rakesh Sharma has told a TASS correspondent in an interview.

"The design of our spacecraft was inspired by the Soyuz design," Sharma pointed out. "It made a lot of sense for India to use the same philosophy."

India's first cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, was a squadron commander in the Indian Air Force in 1982 when he was selected for an international Soviet-Indian space flight and trained at Star City in the Soviet Union. Sharma was part of the crew of the Soyuz T-11 spacecraft, along with Soviet cosmonauts Yury Malyshev and Gennady Strekalov. The spacecraft launched on April 3, 1984 and docked with the Salyut-7 orbital station. The international crew returned to Earth on April 11, 1984. Sharma's flight lasted 7 days, 21 hours and 41 minutes.

In August 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially announced that his country would send the first national space crew into orbit by August 2022, when India would be celebrating 75 years of liberation from British colonial rule. The project's name Gaganyaan (derived from the Sanskrit word for heaven: "gagana") means "celestial ship." However, due to delays stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, which halted most work on the project in March 2020, the Gaganyaan mission is now scheduled for 2025. Four crew members have already been trained at Russia's Star City and are now continuing their training in India.