Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, a pilot of the Indian Air Force, made history today by becoming only the second Indian, after Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma, and the first Indian to the International Space Station (ISS), on a commercial space mission.
The Axiom-4 mission, which takes Shubhanshu Shukla and three other astronauts to the ISS, was successfully launched on Wednesday.
Shubhanshu Shukla, who was born and raised in Lucknow and completed his schooling from City Montessori School’s Aliganj campus, was inspired to serve the nation because of the 1999 Kargil War. This event moved him so much that he cleared the NDA exam to serve his destiny.
He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from the NDA in 2005, followed by pilot training at the Indian Air Force Academy and commissioning into the fighter stream in 2006. He then earned an MTech in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Shukla was selected for India’s Gaganyaan mission in 2019 which took him into the astronaut training programme. He trained with the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia, where he completed the course in 2021. He has also undertaken mission-specific training at the Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru.
