Axiom 4: Dragon Capsule Carrying Shubhanshu Shukla, Crew Successfully Docks with ISS

Axiom 4: On Thursday, at 4.30pm, the Dragon capsule that bears the Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla together with three others successfully docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on the Axiom 4 Mission.

Shukla and the crew took off on Wednesday onboard SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at the NASA Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The crew will spend 14days aboard the ISS performing scientific studies in microgravity.

Under this mission, Shukla was the second Indian person to have travelled to space since Rakesh Sharma in 1984 and first Indian to visit the ISS in 40 years. Sharma had been in the orbit eight days onboard the Salyut-7 station of the Soviet Union in the year 1984.

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Prior to the launch Shukla had stated that he wished his mission will motivate the coming generations much like the journey of Sharma had done 30 years before.

Referring to it in one of the messages sent back home, Shukla has said that adjusting to microgravity was like learning how to live again, like a baby, and that being able to float through vacuum-like space was just amazing. When looking back at the 30-day pre-launch quarantine, he added that what crossed his mind was, just, just let us go.

The Dragon capsule, fixed with a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, lit the night sky when it took off, leaving a trail of glowing plume in the yellow trail across the Atlantic coast of Florida. The astronauts were seen sitting without any tension wearing their white and black coloured suits and buckled into the pressurised cabin when the space craft commenced the mission to the low earth orbit.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft that is to transfer the crew of the Axiom 4 Mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was independently piloted, and was initially to arrive after 28 hours during which the spacecraft was to travel, namely to dock with the space station as both ships fly around the globe approximately 400 km (250 miles) above the planet.

It is a crew of the Axiom 4 spacefaring company; they will join the ISS, which is already occupied by seven astronauts, three NASA astronauts, one astronaut of Japan, and three cosmonauts of Russia.

The four-member Axiom 4 crew is led by Peggy Whitson, who is a former NASA astronaut, the director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space, and is now 65 years old. Her crewmates are Shubhanshu Shukla, 39, from India; Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, 41, from Poland; and Tibor Kapu, 33, from Hungary.

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This is the fourth mission Houston-based Axiom Space has launched since 2022, as part of a broader expansion of private and international astronaut missions to low Earth orbit.

For India, Poland, and Hungary, this launch represented a historic return to human spaceflight after 40 years, and their first crewed mission to the ISS.

In addition to being from the first three countries to send astronauts to the ISS since the end of the space shuttle program, Peggy’s role in the mission is noteworthy. She holds the US record for total duration in space, 675 days, over four missions. She has been NASA's first female chief astronaut and the first female to command the ISS. She also commanded the Axiom 2 Mission in 2023.

Wednesday's launch was also SpaceX's 18th human spaceflight and comes nearly three years after SpaceX began working with NASA in 2020. It restored the ability for the US to send astronauts to space from the US after the retirement of the Space Shuttle mission in 2011!

Axiom Space is one of the few companies, along with Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, developing a commercial space station to operate after the ISS ends operations in 2030. Axiom Space was co-founded by former NASA ISS program head Michael Suffredini.

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