Not just IAF, aspirants from different fields can become astronauts soon: Shukla

The domain of astronauts, presently restricted to Indian Air Force test pilots, will be opened up for aspirants from other branches of the armed forces and different disciplines in the future, enabling a greater number of persons to participate in India’s space programmes.

Stating this during a public interaction with students at the India International Science Festival-2025 here today, Group Captain Subhanshu Skukla, the first Indian to travel to the International Space Station, said it was their responsibility to take the country forward in its space programme.

Pointing out that India already has programmes like a manned space station and a human landing on the Moon under way, he said that unlike the 1960s, when we will go to space, we will have a sustained presence and this will involve enabling of long-duration space missions, development of key technology and creating a scientific and industrial infrastructure around it.

Talking about his mission, Shukla said space is very disorienting, but it is a lot of fun. “When you travel to space again, it gives you a very unique perspective, forces you to solve problems because it is an environment where life should not be existing. There is no air, there is no water, there is no protection from radiation, but you not only sustain life you also thrive there and you conduct science,” he said.

“You have brain fog, headaches, nausea. You do not feel hungry because everything inside your stomach is also floating. So your stomach feels full all the time. You also grow taller in space by 5-10 cm, but when you come back to Earth, you return to normal height,” he said.

When you get to space, you do not have an idea of up or down, left or right. You just forget about it because there is no gravity. So even if you are upside down, you do not realise that. The concept of space also changes, where it is like a three dimensional hall, whereas on Earth we do not use the 3D space but use 2D, Shukla said.

The other interesting concept is the concept of weightlessness. There is only mass, but no weight, he said. Similarly, there are a lot of psychological challenges like confined space and stressful environment that you have to address, Shukla said.

For the first time we were able to conduct microgravity research and bring back the data and analyse it. The other experiments were for solving problems of food security. Then we also took seeds to see the effect of microgravity. They have been brought back and they will be evolved for five generations to see what changes they go through when they experience microgravity, he said.

“You have to create the experiments in a way that they can be done in space because the environment is really different. I think learning of this part was the biggest lesson for us, for the country. I think we have learned this ecosystem and now we know how to do it,” Skukla said.