About Group Captain Shukla’s space mission

The launch of Axiom Space’s Ax-4 mission, which was scheduled for May 29, might be pushed to June. The mission will carry a four-member crew, representing different nations, to the International Space Station (ISS). Indian Air Force’s Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla will pilot the mission.

Axiom runs private missions to the ISS. The first, Ax-1, flew in April 2022. The mission crew will travel aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. Once docked, the astronauts will spend 14 days aboard the orbiting laboratory, conducting scientific research and commercial activities.

Ax-4 mission date

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman V Narayanan said the Ax-4 mission is likely to be launched in the first week of June. On April 29, Axiom Space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that Ax-4 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on May 29. ISRO officials said a technical minor glitch is likely to push the date to June 4.

Importance for India

With Group Captain Shukla, India’s second astronaut since Wing Commander (then Squadron Leader) Rakesh Sharma’s 1984 mission to space, Ax-4 marks India’s return to human spaceflight mission after a gap of four decades.

Shukla’s experience will also be vital for India’s Gaganyaan mission. Adaptation to microgravity and experiments at ISS will be insightful for ISRO.

Commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the mission will include Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski from Poland and Tibor Kapu from Hungary.

India’s pick

Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla has been handpicked as one of the four astronauts for ISRO’s Gaganyaan mission. Commissioned into the IAF fighter wing in June 2006, he boasts of an impressive 2,000 hours of flight experience across various aircraft.

For the spaceflight mission, he was trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow.

Mission by ISRO

The research experiments include 60 scientific studies and activities representing 31 countries, including the US, India, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Nigeria, UAE, and nations across Europe. ISRO will investigate the impact of spaceflight on six varieties of crop seeds.

The project aims to understand how crops may be grown in space for future missions. Three strains of microalgae will be grown and the impact of microgravity on the growth, metabolism and genetic activity will be investigated versus algae grown on the ground.