Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla to lift off to space station on June 8

New Delhi, May 15 (IANS) US-based company Axiom Space on Thursday announced a delay to its Mission-4 (Ax-4), which intended to carry astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, set to become the first Indian ever to go to the International Space Station (ISS).

The mission earlier scheduled for launch on May 29, will now lift off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 8 at 9:11 a.m. ET (6:41 pm IST), the company said.

Shukla, who will pilot the mission, will travel to ISS along with Commander Peggy Whitson (US), mission specialist Sławosz Uznanski-Wisniewski (Poland), and mission specialist Tibor Kapu (Hungary).

“Ax-4 represents a pivotal moment in the growth 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,” Axiom said, in a statement.

Confirming the delay, NASA said the shift is occurring to accommodate "launch opportunities for several upcoming missions".

"The schedule adjustments provide more time to finalise mission plans, spacecraft readiness, and logistics,” added NASA, in a post on social media platform X.

Shukla's travel to space, onboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, comes four decades after Rakesh Sharma's iconic spaceflight onboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft in 1984.

He was included in the astronaut selection process by ISRO in 2019, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018 announced from the Red Fort that a son or daughter of India would go to space very soon.

In January 2025, the 39-year-old astronaut was selected as the pilot for the Ax-4 mission -- a collaborative mission between NASA and ISRO.

“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,” said Shukla, earlier speaking to IANS.

While in space, he will partake in experiments aimed to advance the technologies to build Axiom’s own space station, and the effect of microgravity on cyanobacteria -- a type of bacteria that has an anaerobic pathway.

“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 said.

--IANS

rvt/