India Will Send Astronauts To The Space Station For The First Time
The first Indian astronaut will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) in the near future. The astronaut will join the flight mission run by Axiom Space.
This will be an important achievement for India. The country last sent astronauts into space in 1984 as part of the Soyuz mission. No Indian astronauts have ever flown to the ISS.
This lucky astronaut is Subhanshu Shukla. On the Ax-4 flight mission on June 11, 2025, Shukla will pilot. Together with three other astronauts, they will launch from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), NASA facility, in Florida.
Apart from Shukla, Ax-4 will transport three other astronauts from different countries. There are NASA astronauts totaling Whitson and there are astronauts named Sryptowosz Uzna Marijuki-Wi Mariwiewski and Tibor Kapu, each from Poland and Hungary.
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This is not only the first flight to the ISS for India, but also for Poland and Hungary. The three countries have never flown space astronauts to the ISS.
The only person from India who made it to space is Rakesh Sharma. He flew into space to carry out the Soyuz T-11 mission, the Interkosmos space program run by the Soviet Union.
At that time, Sharma was flown to the space station of Salyut 7. Poland and Hungary also had almost the same fate. Each of the countries launched the last astronauts in 1978 and 1980.