The Axiom 4 Mission’s Dragon capsule, carrying Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla and three crewmates, successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday at 4.30 pm IST.
Shukla and the team had lifted off aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, powered by a Falcon 9 rocket, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Wednesday.
The crew is scheduled to spend 14 days on the ISS conducting scientific research in microgravity.
With this mission, Shukla became only the second Indian to travel to space after Rakesh Sharma and the first Indian to reach the ISS in four decades.
Sharma had spent eight days in orbit aboard the Soviet Union’s Salyut-7 station in 1984.
Ahead of the launch, Shukla had expressed hope that his mission would inspire the next generation, just as Sharma’s journey had done decades earlier.
In a message from space, Shukla described adapting to microgravity as “like learning to live again, like a baby” and called the experience of floating in a vacuum “amazing.” Reflecting on the 30-day pre-launch quarantine, he said, “All I could think was — just let us go.”
The Dragon capsule, mounted atop the two-stage Falcon 9, lit up the night sky as it launched, trailing a glowing yellow plume over Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Live footage showed the astronauts seated calmly in their white and black suits, strapped into the pressurised cabin as the spacecraft began its journey to low Earth orbit.
