After 41 years since Rakesh Sharma's historic spaceflight, Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla is set to embark on the Nasa/SpaceX Axiom Mission 4 to the ISS, potentially becoming the second Indian in space.
Meet Shubhanshu Shukla, the IAF pilot set to become India’s first man in space in 41 years
It’s been a long time coming —41 years, to be precise. On April 3, 1984, Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space. He flew aboard the erstwhile Soviet Union’s Soyuz spacecraft to Salyut-7 space station and spent nearly eight days orbiting the planet.
On Wednesday, 15,044 days later, Indian Air Force Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla is scheduled to be launched into space as pilot on the Nasa/SpaceX/ Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) to the International Space Station (ISS). Once the 40-year-old crosses the Kármán Line — defined as the boundary between earth's atmosphere and outer space, at a distance of 100 km from the surface — he will become the first Indian to be part of a Nasa mission.
The Lucknow-born test pilot will also become the second — or third — Indian in space, depending on whether you count space tourist Gopichand Thotakura, something on which space nuts are divided. Thotakura crossed the Kármán Line for a few seconds last year on a Blue Origin spacecraft as an astronaut.
Other oft-repeated names such as Kalpana Chawla, Sunita Williams, Raja Chari and Sirisha Bandla were or are US citizens of Indian origin. Last year, four were shortlisted for India’s Gaganyaan spaceflight mission. They are Group Captains Prashanth Nair, Angad Prathap, Ajit Krishnan and Shubhanshu Shukla.
The latter’s experience aboard Ax-4 should prove invaluable as the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) prepares for that journey. The Gaganyaan mission is slated to take off in 2027.
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“I grew up reading about him in textbooks, and listening to his stories from space,” says Shukla, referring to Sharma in a video on the Axiom Space website. Shukla came to know he was the chosen one for this mission just a week before he came to Axiom Space’s facilities in the US.
“You don’t know how to respond to such things,” he says in the video, beaming.
Isro had hailed the move as “a significant milestone toward the goal of mounting a joint Isro-Nasa effort to the ISS, as envisioned in the India-US joint statement during the official state visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US in June 2023.” That statement was released during the signing of the Space Flight Agreement between Axiom Space, a private space company, and Isro, to fly an Indian astronaut aboard the mission.
What is not well known is that this mission marks the rekindling of human spaceflight cooperation between Nasa and Isro after more than four decades. This is not the first time an Indian was scheduled to fly on a US spacecraft. Back in the early 1980s, Isro scientists P Radhakrishnan and NC Bhat received extensive training and were scheduled to become astronauts with Nasa on space shuttle missions in the second half of the eighties.
The Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, that killed all seven crew members, meant that those plans never came to fruition, as space shuttle missions were halted for 32 months. There is another little-known name on the list of Indians who missed flying to space in the 1980s—Ravish Malhotra. In 1982, he was chosen for spaceflight training under the Soviet Union's Interkosmos programme, along with Sharma. Malhotra served as backup for Sharma but never went to space himself.
Isro is currently working on the Gaganyaan mission, with a number of tests of various systems and subsystems scheduled for later this year
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