Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, who returned from the International Space Station (ISS) last month aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, hoped India would soon send astronauts to space “from our own capsule, from our rocket, from our soil.”
Addressing a press conference in New Delhi on Thursday, Shukla said his “intangible experiences” over the past year would benefit future Indian space missions, including the Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme and the Bhartiya Antariksh Station (BAS).
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He recalled the rigorous training he and back-up astronaut Prashant B Nair underwent for the Axiom-4 mission, travelling extensively to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), Russia, and Japan, as well as learning from experts at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The two also trained with SpaceX on the Crew Dragon vehicle, the craft that carried Shukla into space.
“The benefit of executing a human spaceflight mission goes beyond the formal training,” Shukla said, adding, “The supplementary knowledge you gain from conversations, the experience of being there, and interactions with people who have a history of human spaceflight — it is invaluable.”
Sharing insights about his space travel, he said despite all the training, he was caught off guard. “No matter how much training you have done, even after that, when you sit in the rocket and the engines ignite, when they catch fire, I think it is a very different feeling; it took me time to catch up,” he said as he recounted the moments after the lift off.
Dumbstruck by the whole experience, he added, “From that moment until the time we splashed down, the experience was unbelievable. It was so exciting and so amazing that I have really been struggling to find words to convey it to you, so that you can live that experience through my words.”
He added that, even today, India looks “saare jahaan se achcha (better than the entire world),” echoing the words of astronaut Rakesh Sharma after his 1984 space mission.
Speaking at the press conference, Union Minister Jitendra Singh attributed the landmark success of India’s space sector particularly in the last five to six years, has been due to India following space strategies similar to the rest of the world in line with the global benchmarks and the question why this coils could not happen in the past five to six decades since the estanli hemnet on Department of Space nearly, 70 years ago.
The Union minister credited the landmark progress of India’s space sector in the last five to six years to the adoption of strategies aligned with global standards. He questioned why similar advances could not have been achieved in the five to six decades since the Department of Space was set up nearly 70 years ago. “Why did all this have to happen only in the last few years? Why couldn’t it have happened in the last five, six decades?” Singh said.
“We have started following the strategies adopted by the rest of the world. Now our benchmarks are global, our strategies are global, and the parameters we seek to live up to are global,” he added.
ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan echoed the minister’s views, highlighting the rapid progress of India’s space programme. He noted that the number of successful missions had nearly doubled between 2015 and 2025, with more than 55 missions, and said the momentum has only grown in the past decade.
He also shared that 80 per cent of the tests for the Gaganyaan human spaceflight mission have been completed since it was first announced by Prime Minister Modi in 2018. As part of preparations, ISRO is expected to soon launch Vyomitra — a humanoid robot — in December this year to test systems for safely sending and bringing back astronauts.
