On Wednesday, Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket propelled India’s Shubhanshu Shukla and three other astronauts from Hungary, Poland and the US towards the International Space Station (ISS). Shukla, the pilot for the Houston-based Axiom Space-chartered mission, is the second Indian to travel to space after Rakesh Sharma in 1984. But if Sharma’s voyage on a Soviet spacecraft had a largely symbolic — and inspirational — significance for a nation taking its early steps in space technology, Shukla’s two-week-long stay at the ISS will serve several practical purposes. In the four decades between the two forays, India’s premier space research agency, ISRO, has taken large strides. From an institution that initially focused on harnessing space technology for national development — agriculture, communication, water management and disaster response — ISRO is today making its mark in launching complex missions to Mars and the Moon. Forty years ago, India did not have the scientific acumen to do complete justice to the experiences gleaned during Sharma’s spaceflight. Now, as its second space traveller makes his way to the ISS, the country is poised to launch its own crewed orbital mission — the Gaganyaan is slated to take off in the first half of 2027.

The task of sending humans into the vast unknown and bringing them back safely is more challenging than the Mars and Moon missions. At the same time, space missions today demand much more than piloting from their crew. They must be adept at performing complex scientific tasks, working well in teams, coordinating with experts on the ground and adjusting quickly to changing conditions. Shukla is one of the four astronauts shortlisted for Gaganyaan. His learnings during the Axiom mission will provide critical inputs to the country’s first crewed space mission. The experiments, which the Axiom voyagers will conduct in fields as diverse as health, biofarming and waste remediation, tie in with ISRO’s recent research objectives. Muscle atrophy, for instance. As underlined poignantly by recent images of Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, spacefarers lose the ability to regenerate muscles during extended stays outside Earth. While this phenomenon has been extensively studied, the precise reasons for cells not repairing well in space are not clear. An ISRO-NASA collaboration during the Axiom mission will use stem cells to examine the muscle repair process. Microgravity mimics, in a much faster way, what ageing and disease do to muscles. That’s why the Axiom studies — which Gaganyaan is slated to build on — hold salience beyond the spacefaring community. Shukla is also armed with an elaborate set of instructions from scientists at the Delhi-based International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, which will enable him to study how microgravity affects algae’s carbon capture and oxygen production — these could provide the rudiments of building an algae-powered life-support system.