My experience at ISS will help in India’s upcoming Gaganyaan mission: Shubhanshu Shukla

He acknowledged that first-hand experience from the ISS mission is invaluable and said that the knowledge gained over the past year has been far more impactful than any ground-based training.

“No matter how much training you have done, even after that, when you sit in the rocket and the engines ignite, when they catch fire, I think it is a very different feeling. I had not imagined how it would feel, and I was actually running behind the rocket for the first few seconds it took me some time to catch up to it,” Sukla said. “From that moment until the time we splashed down, the experience was unbelievable. It was so exciting and so amazing that I have really been struggling to find words to convey it to you, so that you can live that experience through my words.”

Since his splashdown on July 15, Shukla was in Houston re-acclimatising to gravity and debriefing with officials from Axiom Space, SpaceX and NASA. He had spent 18 days on the ISS. (Express Photo by Anil Sharma)

Sharing a message for everyone, including children, Shukla said, “I never thought I would reach here and go to space, but my message to you is… if I can do this, you can do it too. We have to keep moving forward from here, one mission after another. We have Gaganyaan, we’ll have the Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), and a series of missions. I want you to dream, I want you to believe that you can do this, and together we will make it happen.”

Shukla also shared a key message that he had throughout the mission: “While going up, while in orbit, and coming back, Bharat aaj bhi antariksh se sare jahan se accha dikhta hai…(Bharat still looks the most beautiful from space) Jai Hind! Jai Bharat!

“Very soon, we shall see someone travelling from our capsule, from our rocket, from our soil,” Shukla said during a press meet in New Delhi. Also seen in the photo are Group Captain Prashant B Nair, Union Minister Jitendra Singh, and ISRO chairman Dr V Narayanan. (Express photo by Anil Sharma)

Since his splashdown on July 15, Shukla was in Houston re-acclimatising to gravity and debriefing with officials from Axiom Space, SpaceX and NASA. He had spent 18 days on the ISS.

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