(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue October 27, 2025)

There is something about Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla that reminds you of cricketer Rahul Dravid at his peak. It’s not just the handsome, clean-shaven, wavy-haired and weathered look. Or the compact physique, unflappable demeanour and air of quiet assurance. It is also their grit, determination and the rare quality to shoulder huge responsibilities with beguiling nonchalance. Both men have soared to great heights—one figuratively, the other literally—yet they exude the same incredible lightness of being.

advertisement

When Shukla entered a lift at a Mumbai hotel where he was to address a recent India Today Conclave, a lady inside was glued to her phone. When she did look up and saw Shukla, her eyes lit up, jaw dropped and she promptly requested a selfie. When he gracefully obliged, she told him, “You are our real superhero.”

Shukla truly is, though he is only now getting used to the adulation. It was his wife, Kamna, who first told him about the waves his space odyssey was making when he called her from the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting 400 km above Earth this June-July. With no internet or any other media in space, Shukla was hard-focused on the objectives of the mission, unaware of the outpouring of admiration back home.

Shux, as he is fondly called, is grateful that he was chosen to represent his 1.4 billion compatriots, becoming only the second Indian to orbit Earth. This was 41 years after Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma spent a week aboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in April 1984. However, Shukla created a record of his own—the first Indian astronaut to live and work aboard the ISS, the orbiting laboratory on which he spent 18 days.

Shukla had trained rigorously for five years alongside three other Indian Air Force pilots chosen by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 2019 for Gaganyaan, India’s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for lift-off in 2027. When India decided to send an astronaut to the ISS to gain first-hand experience ahead of Gaganyaan, it was Shukla they selected.

To fly Shukla to the ISS on the Axiom-4 mission, aboard the Crew Dragon capsule launched by a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket, ISRO spent $500 million. But the experience the astronaut gained in those three weeks is likely to prove invaluable for India’s space vision.

That vision includes building the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, India’s first orbiting space station, by 2035, followed by plans to land an Indian on the Moon using an indigenous spacecraft by 2040. As Shukla put it, “A lot of things are available on the internet, but when you are part of an activity, you learn things that you don’t find in books. I have brought back these experiences with me, and we have already formalised the process of putting them back into the system.”

advertisement

Before Shukla, 285 astronauts of 23 other nationalities had been on the ISS. On this mission, he became the 634th astronaut to orbit Earth. There has also been a recent flurry of near-orbit flights by the likes of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who have flown to the edge of space in craft their companies have built. But since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961, an average of only 10 astronauts a year have ventured into space.

Shukla is acutely aware of this rare privilege. And like every Indian who has flown into space, he too has come back with a unique experience. Rakesh Sharma had famously said “Sare jahaan se achha” when asked how India looked from above. After her first trip to space in 1998, Kalpana Chawla, a US astronaut of Indian origin who tragically died on her second space mission in 2003, had told india today, “More than my Indianness, when I looked up at the stars one night in orbit, I felt I was a resident of the Milky Way.”

advertisement

Sunita Williams, another US astronaut of Indian origin, carried a Ganesha idol and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on her first trip to space. “In a little spacecraft zipping around Earth, maybe you are taking for granted where you are and what you are doing,” she told this magazine in 2007. “Then, things like Ganesha and the Gita bring you back home and make you feel grounded. It is nice to read about Arjuna’s trials and tribulations up there, as it puts your life in perspective.”

Shukla, too, has returned with a fount of engrossing reflections. He first saw India when the ISS was making a night pass over the subcontinent. “We were coming from south to north,” he recounts in an exclusive interview to India Today, “from the Indian Ocean side.