India’s space agency on Thursday signalled its intention to build a space station to help the country establish the capacity for sustained human presence in space after its first human space flight, scheduled for 2022.

The Indian space station is tentatively intended to be a 20-tonne structure, in orbit about 400km above the Earth, to support scientific experiments and space exploration, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.

The Narendra Modi government has approved Rs 10,000 crore for Isro’s first human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan. The spacecraft is designed to carry a crew of two or three astronauts on a three-day mission in low-Earth orbit. It will be preceded by two unmanned spacecraft missions in 2021 and 2022.

“The Indian space station will be part of our efforts to have a sustained human space programme,” Isro chairperson K. Sivan said. “A detailed project report for the space station is yet to be worked out. We still have to determine the costs and time frame.”

Space department officials said the Indian space station would be a “small structure”, not comparable to the 419-tonne International Space Station, which has been in low-Earth orbit since 1998.

Although the cost and configuration of the Indian space station are yet to be determined, space officials indicated that the current idea is to build the station entirely as an Indian effort.

The International Space Station, in contrast, is a multinational effort with contributions from the American, European, Russian and Japanese space agencies and industries.

A senior space and strategic technology analyst said a collaborative effort between India and China to build a space station could save costs for each country as well as significantly alter geopolitical equations.

“If this effort were to be executed cooperatively with the Chinese on the basis of mutually pre-acknowledged parity, the likely geopolitical reverberations will change the geometry of the current space order,” said V. Siddhartha, a senior analyst who has spent many years with Isro and the Defence Research and Development Organisation.

“The changes would be to the long-term advantage of both countries, (more so) than if each went about its respective human space mission separately,” Siddhartha said.

Space officials said the process of selecting astronauts for the Gaganyaan mission had been initiated in collaboration with defence agencies. The first batch of candidate astronauts from India could be test pilots with the air force or the navy, an official said.

The training of the astronauts is expected to take about 18 to 24 months and will include advanced training in a foreign country in facilities not available in India, Sivan said.