India is celebrating the successful launch of the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission, which lifted off with a multinational crew, including an Indian astronaut.
Lieutenant Commander Subhanshu Shukla, who is the mission’s pilot, became the second Indian ever to travel to space.
Within a few hours, once the spacecraft docks with the International Space Station (ISS), Shukla will become the first Indian to visit NASA’s space laboratory. His journey comes 41 years after cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space, traveling aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 1984.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the successful launch and said that the Indian astronaut “carries with him the wishes, hopes, and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians.”
Led by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson — a space veteran who has twice served as ISS commander, spent over 675 days in space, and conducted 10 spacewalks — Ax-4 launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday.
The journey to the ISS aboard Ax-4 – a commercial flight operated by Houston-based private company Axiom Space – is a collaboration between NASA, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the European Space Agency (ESA), and SpaceX.
The four-member crew also includes Sławosz Użnanski-Wiśniewski from Poland and Tibor Kapu from Hungary. They too are leading their countries back into space after more than four decades. The astronauts spent several weeks in quarantine prior to Wednesday’s launch.
