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Calling human space flight the next logical step, he said the mission is targeting a weeklong journey.

"Human space flight is in our plans. In 2006-07 a feasibility study began on the capability of India to launch a human space flight. The spacecraft will travel 275 to 400 million kilometres around the earth for a week and on its return will launch in the ocean. We found it is feasible," Radhakrishnan told the D D Kosambi Festival of Ideas.

He added that constructing a spacecraft reliable enough to carry humans is the biggest challenge for Isro.

"A vehicle should be such that only one failure in 100 flights can be tolerated. Several things have to be taken care of in the design. If some failure is taking place in the vehicle, we have to know at least nine seconds before so that the crew can be ejected out safely."

He said the GSLV-MK-IIIthe Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk-III, India's largest rocket to dateis suitable for the human space flight mission as its lower section can carry a weight of up to 10 tonnes, which amounts to around 2-3 crew members.

Asked if the country is also working towards a programme that can send humans as tourists to and from Mars, Radhakrishnan indicated that such a plan is far off for the country for now.

Speaking about India's Mars Orbiter Mission, he said ISRO had plan B in place if the onboard liquid engine of Mangalyaan failed to start for the Mars orbit insertion after being in sleep mode for 300 days. "If the main rocket refused to fire, we had plan Bto fire the small thrusters for a very long time. But we didn't have to use plan B."

He said Mangalyaan has now provided a great amount of technology to feed other missions for the country.

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India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

XCOR will offer suborbital flights that will reach the edge of space, about 100km above the ground.

There are a number of misconceptions about space tourism, the most significant being that it doesn't exist yet.

In fact, it's been around since 2001, when Dennis Tito reportedly stumped up $US20 million ($25.6 million) to tag along on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission. The NASA rocket scientist-turned-entrepreneur spent almost eight days orbiting the earth.

It won't be long until people are saying 'travelling into space is so last year'.

Another widespread misapprehension is that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the only company offering extra-terrestrial travel. As we'll get to shortly, there is actually a healthy field of commercial space travel companies developing a diverse range of trips.

An artists' impression of the World View capsule suspended from a balloon at the edge of space. Photo: World View

The good news for aspiring astronauts is that it should soon be possible to travel into space for as little as $75,000. The bad news is the fare will still translate to a minimum of $250 for every minute spent aloft - and that's without even considering the inescapable dangers involved.

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Commercial space travel can be divided into three categories: orbital, suborbital and what might be labelled sub-suborbital.

Space tourist Dennis Tito (left) on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission in 2001. Photo: AP

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Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

IMAGE:The 2012 image (bottom) is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million year-old star Beta Pictoris. The 1997 Hubble image (top) shows... view more

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed edge on picture to date of a large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allows scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.

The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.

"Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models that will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks," said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, Tucson. These structures include a warp in the inner disk caused by the giant planet.

When comparing the latest 2012 images to Hubble images taken in 1997, astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. This means the disk's structure is smooth and continuous, at least over the interval between the Hubble observations.

In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes.

The disk is easily seen because of its edge-on angle, and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust. What's more, Beta Pictoris is 63 light-years away, closer to Earth than most of the other known disk systems.

Though nearly all of the approximately two-dozen known light-scattering circumstellar disks have been viewed by Hubble to date, Beta Pictoris is the first and best example of what a young planetary system looks like.

For one thing, the Beta Pictoris disk is exceptionally dusty. This may be due to recent major collisions among unseen planet and asteroid-sized objects embedded within the disk. In particular, a bright lobe of dust and gas on the southwestern side of the disk may be the result of the pulverization of a Mars-sized object in a giant collision.

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Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

IMAGE:From left to right: Gerhard Meister, Bryan Monosmith and Chuck McClain are shown here with the ORCA prototype, which is a strong contender for a NASA Earth science mission. view more

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk

Its name refers to one of the biggest animals in the sea, but ORCA, the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment instrument, will be observing the smallest.

If selected for a flight mission, ORCA will study microscopic phytoplankton, tiny green plants that float in the upper layer of the ocean and make up the base of the marine food chain.

Conceived in 2001 as the next technological step forward in observing ocean color, the ORCA-development team used funding from Goddard's Internal Research and Development program and NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) to develop a prototype. Completed in 2014, ORCA now is a contender as the primary instrument on an upcoming Earth science mission.

Should it be chosen, ORCA will take ocean-color monitoring to the next level, helping scientists to more precisely measure marine photosynthesis, which is key to the carbon cycle and the ocean food chain.

Like its predecessors that also measured ocean color, the instrument will observe phytoplankton, which blooms en masse, covering hundreds of square miles of the sea surface at once and leaving a trail that is clearly visible from space. In particular, researchers will observe global changes in ocean color to estimate concentrations of chlorophyll, the pigment plants use for photosynthesis -- the process during which the tiny plants convert energy from the sun and carbon dioxide into organic compounds that support life.

About a fourth of man-made carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean, said Chuck McClain, former ORCA principal investigator with Goddard's Ocean Color Group. "The ocean is a big sink for CO2 and part of that sink involves ocean biology."

ORCA builds on the work Goddard scientists and engineers pioneered in the development of ocean color sensors. Goddard's proof-of-concept -- the Coastal Zone Color Scanner that flew on Nimbus-7 from 1978 to 1986 -- was the first sensor to demonstrate that ocean chlorophyll could be measured from space. NASA's Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor mission, which collected data from 1997 to 2010, was the first flagship mission to routinely observe ocean color for long-term climate research. Currently, researchers employ the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.

ORCA's Distinguishing Characteristics

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ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

IMAGE:In this photo, Huang is holding a test board upon which her Ka-band/microwave design is mounted and bonded. Marrero-Fontanez is on her right. view more

Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

The radio frequency band that many NASA missions use to communicate with spacecraft -- S-band -- is getting a bit crowded and noisy, and likely to get more jammed as science missions demand higher and higher data rates.

A team of NASA technologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, just may have a solution, particularly for potential missions that plan to operate in low-Earth orbit and have limited real estate to accommodate communications gear.

Under two different research and development projects, technologists Mae Huang and Victor Marrero-Fontanez have collaborated to test and verify components of a prototype end-to-end Ka-band space communications system, which promises significantly higher data rates -- a whopping 2.4 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) -- over more traditional S-band systems, which theoretically could achieve data rates of 90 megabits of data per second (Mbps).

Huang is working with Goddard's Jeffrey Jaso -- a pioneer in Ka-Band communications -- to develop a Ka-band transmitter. Marrero-Fontanez, meanwhile, is designing Ka-band antennas to receive the Ka-band signals. Huang and Marrero-Fontanez plan to assemble a prototype in 2015.

Huang also will be delivering an engineering test unit of her transmitter to a Goddard team that is considering the technology's use on the proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST, a next-generation observatory proposed for launch in the mid-2020s. WFIRST would carry out wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic surveys of the near-infrared sky, with an emphasis on studying dark energy and exoplanets. Due to its heavy data-rate requirements, the project provided Huang with some funding to advance her technology, she said.

WFIRST isn't the only mission looking for a compact, low-power, end-to-end system. Future Earth-observing missions also are expected to generate higher and higher data rates that could overwhelm the S-band allocations that are shared by space missions using NASA's Near-Earth Network and Deep Space Network and Federal and commercial operations.

"In a sense it's like rush-hour traffic. When you start your morning commute, you may notice fewer cars, but before you know it, you're in stop-and-go traffic as more cars merge onto the highway. The world's frequency bands are beginning to look a lot like bumper-to-bumper traffic," she said. "Cell phones, streaming video, and data communications are all placing big strains on available bandwidth. Meanwhile, commercial businesses are putting pressure on the government to free up other bands, pushing more Federal operations into the S-band that NASA uses. Couple that with NASA's expected need to transmit and receive greater and greater amounts of mission data, something will have to give."

Although NASA has had the Ka-band allocation for years and has used the frequency on past missions, the band has remained underused for a variety of reasons, mainly because of limited technology development, perceived technical challenges, among other things," Marrero-Fontanez said. "However, NASA has always had a strong interest in using this frequency allocation," he added, particularly because it can significantly increase data throughput by a factor of more than 100 as compared with S-band.

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NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise