Rakesh Sharma Flew 126 Orbits in April 1984, Ran 43 Experiment Sessions and Did Yoga in a Harness, and Became the First Indian in Space

At 6:38 pm Indian time on 3 April 1984, a Soyuz-U rocket lifted off from Pad 31 at Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The Indian Express put the story on its front page the next morning and called the lift-off “an awesome spectacle as the rocket streaked into a clear sky.”

Three men sat in the capsule on top. Yuri Malyshev was the commander and Gennadi Strekalov the flight engineer. The third seat belonged to Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma of the Indian Air Force, then 35 years old, according to Frontline.

He landed 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes later, after 43 experiment sessions and a live television call with the Prime Minister. This account rests on the Soviet Interkosmos Council’s own published summary, the Indian citation for his Ashoka Chakra, the Express front page, and Sharma’s interviews over four decades.

A pilot from Patiala with 21 sorties behind him

Born on 13 January 1949 in Patiala, Punjab, Sharma was commissioned into the Air Force on 13 June 1970, the Bharat Rakshak service record shows. According to the Soviet biography on the Heroes of the Country website, which follows a 1988 Soviet dictionary of the title’s holders, he flew 21 combat sorties in the MiG-21 fighter between 3 and 17 December 1971. ThePrint gives the same number. That fortnight of war is told in The war that made a country.

Later came the test pilot school at Bangalore, and by the Soviet count more than 1,600 hours as a test pilot on various aircraft types. From the age of six, he told The Hindu in 2010, he had wanted to fly, after a cousin in the Air Force showed him aeroplanes and their cockpits.

Luck played a part in the selection, he insists. “It could have been anyone,” he told the same paper. “It is like a lottery, meri lag gayi (I got lucky).”

A 1980 suggestion, a 1982 decision and a field of 150

India’s record begins in January 1982. The citation for his Ashoka Chakra puts it this way: “In January 1982, when it was decided that an Indian would go into space on a Soviet space ship, Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma volunteered for this very challenging mission.”

ThePrint reported in 2018 that the flight grew out of a suggestion by the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1980 for a joint Indo-Soviet mission.

After “a very rigorous selection process, which included a most exacting medical test,” the citation continues, he was “selected as one of the two cosmonaut candidates from among 150 highly qualified and experienced pilots of the Indian Air Force.” ThePrint gives the pool as 50 fighter pilots. The citation’s figure is used here, since it is the official record.

Selection took about eight months, Sharma told Frontline, with “some to-ing and fro-ing between Russia and Bangalore.” One test shut him and the other finalist, Ravish Malhotra, in a room with artificial light for three days, to look for signs of what ThePrint calls “latent claustrophobia.” In September 1982 the two men arrived at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow, according to the Interkosmos Council’s S. A. Nikitin, writing in the journal Priroda in July 1984.

Eighteen months of lessons in Russian

“The training lasted 18 months,” Sharma told Frontline. “This was because I first needed to learn the Russian language as it was the medium of instruction as well as the language used during the conduct of the space flight.” By his account in the Ministry of Defence podcast released in June 2025, he picked the language up in about two months, ETV Bharat reports.

Three layers made up the course, in his description: the environment the crew would work in, how their craft would behave there, and the spacecraft itself. Physical training came on top. “The training ensured that our speed, strength and endurance characteristics improved significantly,” he said, and some sessions prepared the body for zero gravity.

At the Gagarin Centre, the Ashoka Chakra citation says, he “applied himself with total devotion and dedication and won acclaim from Soviet Space experts.” It adds that he “completed a most arduous training schedule, with distinction and with exceptional professionalism.”

Nikitin lists the crews as they stood during training. Malyshev, a flight engineer named Rukavishnikov and Sharma made up the main crew, with Anatoly Berezovoy, Georgy Grechko and Malhotra as the backups. Rukavishnikov fell ill, and Strekalov took his seat. Sharma joined the main crew in October 1983, the Heroes of the Country biography says.

One day alone, then six men on a station

Nikitin’s summary records the lift-off at 17:09 Moscow time and an initial orbit 202 kilometres high at its lowest point and 240 at its highest. Salyut 7 was circling higher, between 294 and 305 kilometres.

One date needs a note. Nikitin’s summary, in its English translation, prints 2 April, and many later Indian articles repeat it. On its front page of 4 April the Express reports a lift-off at 6:38 pm Indian time, which is 3 April, and ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre and the flight tables at spacefacts.de give the same date. This piece uses 3 April.

Soyuz T-11 docked with Salyut 7 on 4 April at 18:35 Moscow time. At 21:36 that evening Strekalov and Sharma crossed into the station, Nikitin writes, and an international crew of six began work. Three Soviet cosmonauts under Leonid Kizim, the station’s resident crew, made up the rest.

On 11 April the three visitors landed 46 kilometres east of the city of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan, at 14:50 Moscow time, in the Soyuz T-10 craft that had been docked to the station. Counted from lift-off to touchdown, the flight lasted 7 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes and 6 seconds and covered 126 orbits, spacefacts.de records. ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre counts it as the flight that made India the 14th nation to send a person to space.

“Every minute in space was accounted for,” Sharma told The Hindu, and he wished he had had more time at the window. To Frontline he named the best moment: “when you first look back at planet Earth.” Test pilots, he said, handle the risk of a dangerous flight as routine. What weighs is failure, because in space “it is happening live on television with some 200 experts peering closely at the screen!”

Eight experiments, 43 sessions

Nikitin sets out the flight plan. It held eight experiments: six in space medicine, one in materials called Supercooling, and one remote-sensing programme called Terra. Several were repeated or run as a series, which brought the total to 43 sessions.

The medical work began with Optokinez, which measured how the eyes and the balance system work together in weightlessness. Two long-running medical studies, Anketa and Opros, tracked balance disorders during the flight and the readjustment afterwards, and the crew’s mood at each stage. Vector recorded the electrical activity of the heart. Ballisto picked up the tiny movements of the body caused by each heartbeat, a method called ballistocardiography. Nikitin adds a caution: the records showed that the strength of the heartbeat and the coordination of the heart’s two sides change with time in weightlessness, but “there is still not sufficient experimental data for definitive conclusions.”

The materials experiment melted alloys in orbit to study supercooling, which is a liquid staying liquid below its normal freezing point. Indian specialists chose a silver-germanium alloy, and three compositions were tested. The aim was to learn how to make “metallic glasses,” metals with no crystal structure.

Terra was the programme with the most direct use for India. It planned photographic surveys of Indian territory during nine passes, using a multizonal camera called the MKF-6M and another called KATE-140, plus hand-held cameras. Indian specialists handled aircraft surveys flown at about the same time and measurements on the ground at test sites, so the pictures from orbit could be checked against the land. At their request, two more passes were added to photograph India’s islands in the Bay of Bengal. Spacefacts.de says the data were meant for land-use and coastal maps, forest and crop surveys, and mineral prospecting.

One point is not settled in the sources I could open. Sharma said in the Ministry of Defence podcast that the experiments were “designed by Indian scientists,” with “Indian-made equipment” and results recorded “on apparatus also made by Indians.” Nikitin lists the Soviet Isparitel apparatus for the supercooling runs and Soviet cameras for Terra. Which instruments were built where is not spelled out.

Yoga in a harness of elastic cords

A yoga experiment was run in orbit for the first time, spacefacts.de records. Sharma had studied several yoga positions, five were chosen, and he did them every day of the flight. Nikitin wrote that it “could probably be considered the most curious of the medical experiments.” Its question was whether yoga exercises could protect the muscles and the body’s support system from the effects of weightlessness.

Sharma explained the method to NDTV’s Pallava Bagla. He and Malhotra stopped the Russian training regimen and did yoga for about three or four months before the launch, so that the results could be compared with the cosmonauts’ at every stage: before launch, in orbit and after landing. In space there is no gravity to hold a pose, so a harness of elastic cords stood in for it.

“If a purist had seen us doing yoga, he would have been quite disappointed,” he said. On the result he was equally plain. Preparation by the yogic route was “not worse than what was being done,” he said. “But to say that it was better would need a wider sample.”

The Prime Minister’s call

During the flight, Indira Gandhi spoke to the crew on a live link that also included officials in Moscow, NDTV reported in 2020. WION, in 2019, described it as live on national television, and Prasar Bharati Archives has posted the recording. According to WION, she told Sharma the flight would inspire young Indians to be more adventurous, and that she was glad to hear that “you are feeling well, mentally, physically.”

She asked him in Hindi, “Upar se Bharat kaisa dikhta hai aapko?”, which means “How does India look to you from up there?” Sharma answered with the title line of the poet Allama Iqbal’s song “Saare Jahan Se Achha,” which means “better than the whole world.” Asked about it years later by The Hindu, he laughed: “That is not my line, it is Iqbal’s.”

The Express front page of 4 April carried her remarks on the launch. It gave Indo-Soviet friendship a “new dimension,” she said, and “It is a proud occasion for us.” Her hope was that the first Indian cosmonaut would carry the message of peace that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru left to India.

Recalling in 2025 how India looked from orbit, Sharma gave a longer answer than the song: “It was beautiful… because in our country, as you know, we have everything. We’ve got a long coastline; we’ve got the Ghats; we’ve got plains, deserts, tropical forests, hills, and mountains…Himalayas.”

A decree on landing day and a citation in the Gazette

The Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet signed the decree on 11 April 1984, the day the crew landed. Sharma was named a Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal, number 11510, “for the successful carrying out of an international space flight and the courage and heroism shown in it,” in the Heroes of the Country biography’s wording, translated here from the Russian.

India’s honour was the Ashoka Chakra, its peacetime gallantry award. Bharat Rakshak’s record, which reproduces the Gazette of India, shows it announced on 26 January 1985. The citation covers his volunteering, the selection and the training, and stops there. It says nothing of the flight itself. Malyshev and Strekalov received the same decoration, which Bharat Rakshak calls the first and only time the Ashoka Chakra went to foreigners.

What came next

Sharma went back to flying. At Hindustan Aeronautics Limited he became chief test pilot and was chief project pilot for the Light Combat Aircraft, the Tejas, he said in the 2025 podcast.

The Soviet summary traces the partnership to a January 1964 agreement on equipping the rocket range at Thumba in Kerala, and calls the 1984 flight “the logical continuation” of the work since. It lists three Indian satellites launched by Soviet rockets from Kapustin Yar: Aryabhata on 19 April 1975, Bhaskara on 7 November 1979 and Bhaskara-2 on 20 November 1981. What the programme did on its own rockets and budget is told in How ISRO became a space power on a famously small budget.

In 2018 Sharma said the country’s first crewed mission would have to be Indian-built. “We have to do it by ourselves,” he told ThePrint, “as, like most cutting-edge technologies, this is not available off the shelf.” ANI noted in February 2024 that the four astronaut candidates named for Gaganyaan had trained at the same Gagarin centre where he had.

In June 2025 Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the International Space Station on the Axiom-4 mission, the second Indian in space. Sharma sent him a video message. “Wishing you all the best. To the crew: Godspeed! Spend as much time as you can looking out of the window.”