Astronaut and Indian Air Force Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla on Tuesday said Bengaluru looked the "brightest" and "most beautiful" when the International Space Station (ISS) flew over India.
At an interactive session and felicitation ceremony held by the Karnataka Department of Science and Technology at the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Shukla, who was on the ISS in June, showed a video of a night pass over India. "The most beautiful thing in that entire India pass you will see is Bengaluru city. It's the brightest city in the southern parts of our country, and that stands out, really stands out," he said.
Displaying a night-pass video captured from the spacecraft, he described the approach from the southwest over the Indian Ocean: "We are flying over India... It's a night pass. We are coming from the Indian Ocean, from the southwest side, heading northeast."
Then came the moment that drew applause from the Bengaluru crowd: "And the most beautiful thing in that entire India pass you will see is the Bangalore City."
The video showed by Shukla at the event also showed flashes, which were thunderstorms and lightning on the Earth visible from space. In the video, Hyderabad and Pune were visible, apart from the curvature of the Earth and the orbital sunrise.
"The green glow you see is the curvature of the Earth... See the flashes? These are all thunderstorms. This is India emerging, and the brightest city you see in the south is Bangalore. Then there is Hyderabad and Pune on the left."
The video concluded with a spectacular moment that he called one of the most breathtaking sights: "And this is the sunrise... this is how an orbital sunrise looks when it happens in space."
He asserted that maintaining strong physical and mental health as well as bringing discipline into your life can help them become an astronaut representing the country like him. "It is a bright future for our country. I'm very excited about all the possibilities that the country is going to provide us, and you are all going to be recipients of it," he said to an audience that also comprised students.
Shukla also showed videos of his training ahead of the Axiom-4 Mission, while adding that the Gaganyaan Mission is a means for India to achieve "world-class space capability". "I may appear as a hero to you today, but thousands of engineers, doctors and specialists made my mission possible. You can become any one of them," he said.
He also shared the harsh realities of space travel: the difficulty of adjusting to microgravity, struggling to stand after returning to Earth, and the extreme G-forces astronauts endure. "In emergencies, the spacecraft can exert 18-20 GSAT-it feels like an elephant sitting on your chest," Shukla said.
Shukla had made a light remark on Bengaluru's traffic last week. "I am coming all the way from the other side of Bengaluru, from Marathahalli, so I have spent twice the time that I am going to be spending on this presentation with you. You have to look at the commitment that I have," he had said at the Bengaluru Tech Summit (BTS).
