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.
Source: www.space.com
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