Shubhanshu Shukla Became the First Indian on the International Space Station in June 2025, 41 Years After Rakesh Sharma, and Ran Seven Indian Experiments in Orbit

Ten minutes after a Falcon 9 rocket left Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on 25 June 2025, Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla of the Indian Air Force spoke to India from inside the Dragon capsule. “Namaskar, my dear countrymen; after 41 years, we have reached space. It was a great ride,” he said, as The Tribune recorded it.

Liftoff came at 2:31 in the morning Eastern time, which was just after noon in India. Travelling at 7.5 kilometres a second, according to The Tribune, he added, “I have the Indian tricolour on my shoulders. It tells me I am with you all.” Shukla described the flight as “the beginning of India’s human spaceflight era.”

About 28 hours later the capsule, a new Dragon the crew had named Grace, docked with the International Space Station. Shukla stayed on the station for 18 days, ran seven experiments built by Indian laboratories, spoke to the Prime Minister from orbit, and came down in the Pacific off California on 15 July 2025.

The 41 years between two Indian flights

The last Indian to fly before him was Rakesh Sharma, an Air Force pilot who lifted off on the Soviet Soyuz T-11 on 3 April 1984. According to the Google Arts & Culture profile of him, Sharma spent 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes aboard the Salyut 7 station with the Soviet cosmonauts Yury Malyshev and Gennady Strekalov. The crew ran 43 experimental sessions, and Sharma’s own work was mainly in biomedicine and remote sensing. Yoga’s effect on the body in microgravity was among his tests, and his photographs of India from orbit saved two years of aerial photography for mapping the same area, the profile says.

Before any of that, he had flown 21 MiG-21 missions in the 1971 war. Sharma landed in Kazakhstan on 11 April 1984, and India awarded him the Ashok Chakra in 1985. At a joint television news conference with officials in Moscow, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked him how India looked from space, and he answered “Saare Jahan Se Achha,” words from a patriotic poem by Muhammad Iqbal.

Between the two flights lay 41 years, from 3 April 1984 to 25 June 2025. ISRO traces the next one to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the United States in June 2023, and NASA says the mission delivered on a commitment that Modi and President Trump had highlighted, to send the first ISRO astronaut to the station. This time the seat was on a commercial mission run by Axiom Space, on a SpaceX rocket and capsule, which NASA counts as the fourth NASA-supported private astronaut mission to the station.

Four test pilots, two for this seat

For Gaganyaan, its own crewed programme, ISRO had already picked four Indian Air Force test pilots and trained them abroad and in India. On 27 February 2024, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, the Prime Minister named them and gave them astronaut wings: Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla.

Modi’s words, in the Press Information Bureau’s record of the speech, were: “After 40 years, an Indian is going to space. But now, the time, the countdown and the rocket is ours.”

Shukla was assigned as prime crew for the Axiom seat and Nair as his backup. Both began training in the United States in the first week of August 2024. The first phase, per ISRO’s note, included tours of mission ground facilities, an overview of the launch phases, SpaceX suit fit checks, familiarisation with Dragon and the station’s systems, and drills for emergencies, medical ones among them.

Later phases covered, in ISRO’s words, advanced spacecraft systems, emergency protocols, payload operations, microgravity adaptation, space medicine and survival training, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Axiom’s headquarters in Houston and SpaceX’s Dragon simulators. A wilderness course in Mexico, aimed at “team cohesion and resilience under stress,” also went into their preparation.

Asked by Jatan Mehta, an independent writer on Indian space, how the pilot’s training differed from the rest of the crew’s, Axiom replied that Shukla was “trained to monitor Dragon’s systems during all critical phases” and “trained to intervene manually if necessary.” Mehta also records Axiom’s statement that the crew trained at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne and at Japan’s Tsukuba Space Center. A health quarantine began on 25 May 2025 and ran 32 days, Axiom says, one of the longest in the history of human spaceflight.

Six delays, and a leak India would not fly with

The first launch date was 29 May 2025, and six postponements followed before the crew flew, The Tribune counted. Causes listed by ISRO include a harness problem in Dragon, weather in the ascent corridor, a leak in the Falcon 9’s first stage and a leak in the station’s Russian Zvezda module.

A delegation led by ISRO’s chairman, Dr V Narayanan, was in the United States for the launch. In ISRO’s telling, it “made its stand clear that all problems should be resolved before clearing the launch for lift-off, considering the mission risks and safety of the crew.” Repairs forced the launch set for 19 June to be called off, and the delegation flew home and returned for the new date. At ISRO’s insistence the rocket was repaired, The Tribune reports.

Twenty-eight hours to the station

Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who directs human spaceflight at Axiom, commanded the mission, and Shukla was its pilot. The two mission specialists were Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, a European Space Agency project astronaut from Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, who flew under his country’s HUNOR programme, short for Hungarian to Orbit. Axiom says Whitson finished the flight with 695 cumulative days in orbit, the most of any American.

India, Poland and Hungary each sent a government-sponsored astronaut to the station for the first time, Axiom’s recap says. All three countries had launched their first astronauts decades earlier and were returning to human spaceflight after more than 40 years.

Docking at the Harmony module’s space-facing port came at 6:31 in the morning Eastern time on 26 June, according to Axiom, and the hatch opened at 8:14. Expedition 73, the station’s resident crew, welcomed the four with hugs and handshakes, The Tribune reports, and Whitson handed astronaut pins to the three first-time flyers.

At the welcome ceremony Shukla said, “I am astronaut 634. It is a privilege to be here.” Later he said, “With your love and blessings, I have reached the International Space Station. It looks easy to stand here, but my head is a little heavy, facing some difficulty; but these are minor issues.” He closed with, “I am carrying the tiranga and I am carrying all of you with me.”

Seven experiments from Indian laboratories

A portfolio ISRO published on 28 April 2025 lists seven experiments, each proposed by Indian researchers and coordinated by the Human Space Flight Centre.

The Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru supplied two. One tracked the survival, revival and reproduction of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal known for surviving extremes, from the BLR strain of the genus Paramacrobiotus. Its other study looked at how people interact with electronic displays in microgravity. Also in Bengaluru, the Institute of Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine tested the effect of metabolic supplements on muscle regeneration.

Delhi’s International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology ran two. Cyanobacteria, microbes that photosynthesise, were grown on urea and on nitrate to compare their growth and proteins. Edible microalgae, studied with the National Institute of Plant Genome Research, were exposed to the station’s radiation.

The last two concern food plants. Researchers at the University of Agricultural Sciences and IIT in Dharwad sprouted methi (fenugreek) and moong (mung beans) in orbit, with crew nutrition in mind. Scientists from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology and the Kerala Agricultural University’s College of Agriculture at Vellayani measured the growth and yield of food crop seeds after microgravity.

All seven were completed, ISRO said on 15 July, and the samples came back for detailed analysis on the ground. Redwire, an American company, coordinated the payload integration. Across the whole crew about 60 experiments were run, NASA says, and NASA and ISRO took part in five joint science investigations and two in-orbit science, technology, engineering and mathematics demonstrations.

Handicrafts designed by students of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad also made the trip, according to ISRO.

The call from orbit

Day three of the mission, 28 June, brought an 18-minute video call from Modi, Outlook reports, citing PTI. “Shubhanshu, today you are the farthest from the land of India, but the closest to the hearts of every Indian,” the Prime Minister said.

Seeing India from space for the first time, Shukla told him, it “appeared much larger and grander than on the map.” “You can truly feel the sense of oneness” in orbit, he said, and “there are no borders, no lines. It feels as if this entire Earth is our home and we are all its citizens.” The station circles the Earth 16 times a day, giving the crew 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. “Right now, we are travelling at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour. This speed reflects how fast our nation is progressing and now, we must go even beyond this.”

Gajar ka halwa, moong dal halwa and aam ras (mango nectar) had gone up with him, and fellow astronauts relished them, per the same report. Sharma’s food in 1984, according to Google Arts & Culture, was suji halwa, aloo chhole and vegetable pulao packed by the Defence Food Research Lab in Mysore.

The Prime Minister then set out the next goals. “We have to take Mission Gaganyaan forward. We must build our own space station. And we must ensure that an Indian astronaut lands on the Moon,” he said.

Other contacts followed. ISRO lists a video session with school students in Thiruvananthapuram and Lucknow on 3 July, amateur radio sessions on 4 July with students and engineers at ISRO’s U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru and on 8 July with seven schools in Northeast India through the North Eastern Space Applications Centre in Meghalaya, and a teleconference with ISRO’s chairman on 6 July.

Splashdown off California

A farewell ceremony aboard the station was held on 13 July, and Dragon undocked at 7:15 in the morning Eastern time on 14 July, NASA says. Splashdown off California came at 5:31 in the morning Eastern time on 15 July, NASA reports, or about 15:03 India time by ISRO’s clock. Teams on SpaceX recovery vessels retrieved the capsule and the astronauts, NASA says, and Shukla was extracted in stable condition, in ISRO’s words.

Counts of the trip differ slightly by source. For the 18 days aboard the station ISRO gives about 12 million kilometres and about 282 orbits, while Axiom counts 288 orbits docked and 320 over the whole flight of about 20 days.

A seven-day post-flight medical programme under ISRO and Axiom flight surgeons followed. Shukla reached India on 17 August, IANS reports, after a month of rehabilitation in the United States, and met the Prime Minister the next day. At a press briefing on 21 August he said: “I would like to thank every citizen of this country who behaved in a way that made it feel like they actually owned this mission. I truly felt that this was a mission for the entire nation.” Life on the station, he said, “is very different from what you learn on the ground. It was an unbelievable experience.”

A Union Cabinet resolution welcoming him back called the flight “the first time an Indian astronaut travelled to the International Space Station.” Chandrayaan-3’s landing near the Moon’s south pole on 23 August 2023 and the Aditya-L1 solar mission, both recalled in the resolution, are covered in our piece on ISRO’s record on a small budget. Reforms in the sector, the Cabinet added, had produced about 300 new space start-ups, the companies profiled in India’s NewSpace piece.

What it cost, and the argument about it

The figure depends on who gives it. Around ₹600 crore had been spent, covering the training of two astronauts and other preparations, said Nilesh Desai, director of ISRO’s Space Applications Centre, on 15 July 2025, WION reported. Minister Jitendra Singh gave the Lok Sabha ₹548 crore, Deccan Herald reported on 18 August. In Mehta’s summary, critics called the flight an expensive joyride because Dragon flies largely on automation. ISRO’s chairman told the Times of India, as Mehta quotes him: “The ₹548 crore spent on the mission is a fraction of what India would’ve otherwise needed to spend on replicating the same training, exposure and systems-level experience.”

What ISRO took from it, and where Gaganyaan stands

On launch day ISRO said the flight would give hands-on experience in international crew integration, medical and psychological preparation, real-time health data, running experiments and crew-to-ground coordination, and that these insights “will directly influence mission planning, safety validation, and astronaut readiness for India’s first indigenous human spaceflight mission.” A mission operations team from ISRO stayed in Houston alongside NASA and Axiom flight controllers, taking part in real-time decisions, telemetry tracking, crew timelines and health monitoring.

In the Cabinet’s resolution the flight is “a vital stepping stone towards India’s own human spaceflight ambition, including the Gaganyaan and the Bharatiya Antariksha Station.” In August Shukla said, “We were also fortunate to have training on the Soyuz, which launches from Russia, as well as on Crew Dragon.”

The schedule has moved since. On 25 June 2025 ISRO targeted the first uncrewed Gaganyaan test flight for the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first crewed Indian mission for the first quarter of 2027. On 6 August 2026 Jitendra Singh told the Rajya Sabha that the first uncrewed flight, carrying the Vyommitra half-humanoid robot, is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, followed by two more uncrewed missions in the crewed flight’s configuration, targeted by 2027, before India’s first human orbital mission. The crew escape system has passed its in-flight test, TV-D1, he said, and two integrated air drop tests have validated the deceleration system. The Cabinet approved ₹20,193 crore in September 2024 for eight human spaceflight missions. The Bharatiya Antariksh Station is planned to be operational by 2035, and the government has approved its first module, BAS-01.