Indian astronaut Gp Capt Shukla to fly to space on 29th May
India News: Axiom-4 will carry a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station, where they would stay for two weeks and perform 60 experiments. The astronauts would be flying on the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule.
On 29th May 2025, Indian Air Force fighter pilot-turned-astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla will launch to space from the American Spaceport in Florida. Shukla will be flying as part of the American commercial mission Axiom-4. Shukla will also be the first Indian astronaut to fly to the International Space Station, an orbiting lab that is 425 km above the earth. WION’s Sidharth M.P. had exclusively reported about this May-month spaceflight, back in January 2025.
Also Read |Exclusive: Indian astronaut ‘Shuks’ to fly to space in May 2025
Axiom-4 will carry a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station, where they would stay for two weeks and perform 60 experiments. The astronauts would be flying on the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule. This mission will facilitate the return to human spaceflight for India, Poland, and Hungary, given that each nation’s first and only government-sponsored spaceflight had taken place more than 40 years ago. The Ax-4 crewmembers will represent their nations in Low Earth Orbit and perform scientific experiments and demonstrations that are of high national importance.
This Axiom-4 mission is a result of deepening Indo-US Space cooperation, which came to the fore during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s State visit to the United States in June 2023. Back then, President Biden had announced Indo-US collaboration on human spaceflight and the mission to send an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station, marking the highest point in India-US space ties.
Peggy Whitson, former NASA astronaut and director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space, will command the Axiom-4 mission, while ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla will serve as pilot. The two mission specialists are ESA (European Space Agency) project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
How will Axiom-4 help India’s Gaganyaan Human Spaceflight programme?
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Gaganyaan is India’s attempt at launching its astronauts to space and returning them safely, using an indigenously developed rocket, spacecraft, and supporting technologies. Gaganyaan was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018, and it is the first step in a series of sustained human spaceflight missions that the Indian Space agency ISRO wants to carry out in a phased manner. By the end of this decade, India hopes to put an uncrewed space station in Earth orbit. By 2035, it would be used as a crewed Indian outpost that’s circling the earth. By 2040, India is targeting a crewed moon landing, a feat that only America has accomplished back in 1969, and China hopes to accomplish by the end of this decade.
Gaganyaan would be carried out by the Indian Space Agency ISRO, with test pilots of the Indian Air Force, serving as the crew members. The four candidates—Group Captains Prashant Balakrishnan Nair, Shubhanshu Shukla, Ajit Krishnan, and Angad Pratap—had completed their training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Moscow, in 2021. Since then, they have also undergone several theoretical and practical sessions at ISRO’s Human Spaceflight Centre and the Indian Air Force’s Institute of Aerospace Medicine. They have also been visiting various ISRO centres, such as ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram and Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.
WION had exclusively reported that Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and Group Captain Prashant Balakrishnan Nair have been training at facilities in the US, Europe, and Japan, in preparation for Axiom-4. For Axiom-4, the primary Indian candidate is Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and Group Captain Ajit Krishnan is the backup candidate.
Also Read |Exclusive: Indian astronauts Shukla, Nair trained in US, EU, Japan
The Axiom-4 mission is meant to serve as a precursor to India’s Gaganyaan, as Shukla’s spaceflight would help India gain contemporary spaceflight experience, valuable technological and experiential insights. While serving as ISRO Chief, Dr. S. Somanath had explained to WION that human spaceflight is a highly challenging endeavour and that India only had the limited experience of Rakesh Sharma's flight in 1984.
He had added that the Indian astronaut (Shukla) flying to the International space station would immensely benefit the Gaganyaan programme. Notably, the maiden spaceflight by an Indian was on a Soviet-era Soyuz T-11 spacecraft, and since then the technologies have changed drastically. Presently, in America, SpaceX is the lone entity that has a track record of reliably ferrying astronauts to the space station on their Crew Dragon craft, while Boeing faces technical trouble with their Starliner craft.
