K. Kumar

Kumar, Deputy Director, Human Factors Engineering & Mission Entity in Human Spaceflight Centre, Bangalore. He is also the Associate Project Director (Overall Mission) for Gaganyaan Programme of ISRO.

After graduation in Aeronautical Engineering, he joined Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre/ISRO, Trivandrum in 1990. He completed his Master’s programme in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and worked in ISRO in various capacities as Project Manager for ISRO’s first Space Capsule Recovery mission (SRE 1), Deputy Project Director of Human Spaceflight Project and Associate Programme Director for Advanced Space Transportation systems.  

He is currently involved in overall design of Gaganyaan mission considering physiological tolerance limits of astronauts during space flight.  Presently he is working on protective shields for crewed spacecraft to mitigate space debris threat, Digital Human Modelling for Ergonomic assessment of space capsule, Musculo-skeletal Analysis of human activities under varied gravity conditions and establishment of metrics for assessment of injury to crew during spaceflight.

He has received ISRO team excellence award for the year 2007 and 2018 for the successful completion of Space Capsule Re-entry Experiment mission (2007) and Crew Escape System Pad abort test mission (2018). He has authored many technical papers in the area of space flight dynamics, re-entry mission, crew escape systems, Space debris mitigation and Human Factors in various national and international conferences.