The SpaceX Dragon capsule, carrying Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and his three worldwide crewmates on Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4), efficiently docked with the Worldwide House Station (ISS) as we speak at roughly 4:30 PM IST. This milestone marks Shukla as solely the second Indian to journey to house and the primary in 4 a long time to achieve the orbiting outpost.
Axiom Mission 4 aboard the @SpaceX Dragon docked to the station at 6:31am ET as we speak. Quickly the Ax-4 astronauts will open the hatch and greet the Exp 73 crew reside on @NASA+. Extra… https://t.co/XmWYPa4BhT pic.twitter.com/LjjMd7DfmW
— Worldwide House Station (@Space_Station) June 26, 2025
The Ax-4 crew blasted off aboard the Dragon spacecraft, propelled by a Falcon 9 rocket, from NASA’s Kennedy House Centre in Florida on Wednesday. After a rigorously managed 28-hour orbital journey, the autonomously flown capsule met the ISS as each spacecraft glided round 400 km (250 miles) above Earth.
Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla’s pioneering flight is within the footsteps of Cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma, who spent eight days onboard the Soviet Union’s Salyut-7 station in 1984. Shukla, in distinction to Sharma, is the primary Indian to fly to the ISS and as a pilot in an operational capability of a industrial mission, a serious advance for India’s ambitions in human spaceflight, together with its Gaganyaan program.
Earlier than the launch, 39-year-old Shukla had mentioned he hoped his mission would encourage the following technology, similar to Sharma’s had all these a long time in the past. In a press release from house, he had described getting used to microgravity as “like studying to reside once more, like a child” and floating round within the vacuum as “superb.” Recalling the 30-day quarantine earlier than the launch, he had joked, “All I may suppose was — simply allow us to go.
Wednesday’s launch witnessed the Falcon 9 rocket superbly illuminate the night sky, forsaking a blazing yellow cloud throughout Florida’s Atlantic coast. The astronauts, together with Shukla, have been seen in reside footage trying calm of their white-and-black full-bodied fits, safely buckled into the pressurized cabin because the spacecraft climbed to low Earth orbit.
The four-person Axiom 4 crew is led by 65-year-old Peggy Whitson, a retired NASA astronaut and Axiom House human spaceflight director, who’s the US file holder for complete time spent in house (675 days). Her crewmates are Shubhanshu Shukla (39) of India, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (41) of Poland, and Tibor Kapu (33) of Hungary.
This flight is the fourth for Axiom House out of Houston since 2022, because the agency builds out its personal and overseas astronaut missions to low Earth orbit. For Poland, Hungary, and India, it represents a historic return to human spaceflight after greater than 4 a long time and their first crewed mission to the ISS.
The Ax-4 crew will keep on the ISS for 14 days, the place they are going to carry out round 60 scientific analysis experiments in house circumstances, of which seven can be from India. These Indian experiments embrace joint analysis in collaboration with ISRO and NASA on subjects similar to muscle regeneration, the expansion of microalgae, and the affect of microgravity on the human physique.
The Wednesday launch additionally marked the 18th human spaceflight for SpaceX, highlighting its massive collaboration with NASA since 2020 that has reopened the US’s skill to launch astronauts from dwelling because the retirement of the House Shuttle program in 2011. Axiom House, based by a previous NASA ISS program director, is within the strategy of creating a industrial house station with the intent to interchange the ISS upon its projected retirement in about 2030.