The Man Who Took India to the International Space Station | Shubhanshu Shukla

India's first crewed flight and the industry it seeds

Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the International Space Station as the only pilot on India's first crewed mission, a prototype flight meant to seed the country's own space program. He and host Aditya Agarwal make the case that India's space industry is at the start of a buildout, with government missions creating demand that private companies can serve.

Takeaways

• Gaganyaan is a prototype mission. India's first capsule, service module and crewed flight is a first-of-its-kind mission, so the team preferred test pilots who evolve the vehicle with its designers. Shukla was the only pilot of four crew, chosen from India's 72 test pilots after two evaluation trips to Russia.
• Selection tests psychology more than physique. Physical benchmarks existed, including a 5km run under 24 minutes and an 800-metre swim under 20 minutes, but the hardest test was seven days of isolation with no clock or natural light. Most early rejections came on dental health.
• Microgravity rewrites the body in a week. Fluid shifts to the head, the heart shrinks 10 to 15 percent and the spine stretches about five centimetres, with adaptation in roughly a week. Space fog from the otolith organs slows even familiar tasks.
• India's space startups have a long runway. Nearly 400 space startups have appeared in India. Shukla points to Mission Gaganyaan, the planned Bharatiya Antariksh Station and a crewed Moon landing by 2040 as the demand, and says private opportunity runs until India reaches the Moon.
• South Park Commons shifted to hard tech. Agarwal says the firm was mostly software and AI, but its focus for the last 18 to 24 months has been hard tech, with space docking and laser companies in the portfolio. He expects SpaceX to IPO before the end of the year.
• One good reason is enough to say yes. Agarwal grew bored of an Oracle job after six months and joined Facebook when it had four or five people, with no idea it would succeed. He argues people talk themselves out of things by listing reasons to say no.
• Orbit makes the whole planet home. Shukla says the strongest feeling was that the whole planet is home, while he carried the weight of representing 1.4bn people. Preparing to speak to the Prime Minister on his second or third day, he heard Hindi on the ISS radio for the first time.

What a Mars mission demands

• With current technology the shortest trip to Mars is six months one way, so a round trip plus time on the surface runs past a year.
• Radiation, habitation, waste and food are the open problems for long-duration travel.
• Artemis II travelled about 384,000 kilometres, with no communication on the far side of the Moon, and Shukla says its coverage democratised interest in interplanetary travel.