New Delhi: Axiom Space, the United States-based commercial spaceflight company, has announced a revised launch date for its Mission-4 (Ax-4). This mission will carry Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station (ISS), marking a historic milestone as he becomes the first Indian to travel to the ISS.
Originally scheduled for May 29, the mission will now lift off on June 8 at 9:11 a.m. Eastern Time (6:41 p.m. IST) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft, Dragon, developed by SpaceX, will ferry Shukla along with three other international crew members: Commander Peggy Whitson of the United States, mission specialist Sławosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland, and mission specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
Axiom Space said the Ax-4 mission represents a “pivotal moment” in the evolution of commercial human spaceflight. “For the first time in history, astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary will fly together to the International Space Station as part of a government-sponsored mission – with each nation returning to human spaceflight after more than four decades,” the company stated.
NASA confirmed the rescheduling, attributing the shift to the need to accommodate launch windows for several upcoming missions. “The schedule adjustments provide more time to finalise mission plans, spacecraft readiness, and logistics,” the space agency noted in a post on social media platform X.
Shukla’s mission will be India’s most significant human spaceflight since Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to travel to space in 1984 aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. Shukla was selected in 2019 through an astronaut training and evaluation process conducted by ISRO, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2018 Independence Day declaration that an Indian would soon venture into space.
In January 2025, the 39-year-old was officially chosen as the pilot for Ax-4, a collaborative venture between NASA and ISRO. As the pilot, Shukla will work in coordination with the commander to manage spacecraft systems, navigate the vehicle, monitor onboard data, and intervene manually if necessary.
“During the transit journey, I’m going to be acting as the mission pilot, so I will be working alongside the commander of the vehicle, managing the systems, navigating the vehicle, and looking at all the data that is available, and if required, intervening and interacting with the systems if something was to go wrong or there was a need for a manual intervention,” Shukla told IANS in a prior interview.
While aboard the ISS, he will participate in scientific research designed to support Axiom’s future plans of building its own commercial space station. One of the key experiments will study the behaviour of cyanobacteria in microgravity, particularly their potential to sustain human life during extended space missions by producing oxygen.
“Cyanobacteria are being studied to see how well they can perform the activity in microgravity and the possibility of utilising them for future missions to provide an environment, an oxygen-rich environment for the crew who is going to stay,” Shukla explained.
With IANS inputs