CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Houston-based company Axiom Space is about to launch the first Indian astronaut to orbit since 1984.
Group Captain (IAF) Shubhanshu Shukla will serve as pilot for the Ax-4 mission, which is scheduled to launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday morning (June 11) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
Ax-4 will lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the eyes of more than just the nation of India following it to space.
The four-person Ax-4 will be commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now Axiom’s director of human spaceflight. The other crewmates are Shukla and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Tibor Kapu, who hail from Poland and Hungary, respectively.
The quartet will spend about 14 days conducting research and technology demonstrations aboard the ISS, with the goal of completing over 60 experiments with contributions from more than 30 countries — a record number for an Axiom mission. It will be the first time in space for Shukla, Uznański-Wiśniewski and Kapu, and the first time representatives from each of their countries flies a mission to the ISS.
Poland, Hungary and India have all had astronauts fly to space before, but have never sent anyone to the ISS. Of the three countries, however, only India is currently in the midst of developing and testing its own crew-capable spacecraft, Gaganyaan, which is scheduled to launch astronauts for the first time in 2027. Last year, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced that Shukla will be one of the four astronauts to fly that inaugural crewed mission.
Ax-4 will mark Shukla’s first spaceflight, and the first orbital human spaceflight for an Indian citizen since 1984. That previous honor fell to Rakesh Sharma, the only other person from the nation to have reached space to date. He did so as a part of the Soviet Interkosmos space program’s Soyuz T-11 mission to the Salyut 7 space station. The same program is also responsible for launching the first Polish citizen to space in 1978, and the first Hungarian astronaut in 1980.
“I grew up reading about [Sharma] in textbooks and listening to his stories from space. I was deeply, deeply impressed by him,” Shukla told reporters during a press conference in January. “The thought of becoming an astronaut myself never really took root, because India did not have an active human spaceflight program back then,” he said.
Now, he hopes his mission can inspire a new generation of Indian astronauts. “I truly believe that even though I, as an individual, am traveling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people,” he said.
Even with space in his periphery during childhood, Shukla’s career path still took him to the skies. He was accepted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter wing in 2006, where he gained experience as a combat leader and test pilot, and was promoted to the rank of group captain in 2024.
Shukla’s Ax-4 crewmates are also very accomplished in their fields. Whitson holds the record for most cumulative time spent in space by an American (675 days), and has flown to space four times prior to this mission. Uznański-Wiśniewski used to serve as chief engineer for the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, before becoming a member of the European Space Agency’s Astronaut Reserve Class of 2022. And Kapu has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a specialty in polymer technology. He was selected by the Hungarian to Orbit astronaut program in 2023.
Ax-4 is scheduled to lift off from from KSC’s Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) on Wednesday at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). The crew will spend about a day aboard their SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft catching up to the ISS for rendezvous and docking, which is scheduled for Thursday morning (June 12).
Dragon will remain docked to the ISS for about two weeks, as the crew completes the mission’s science and outreach goals. After departing the space station sometime during the last week of June, Ax-4 will parachute back to Earth for a splashdown off the United States’ West Coast.
