"Easier To Do It First, Then Tell Everybody": Shubhanshu Shukla's Mantra

Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla applied for astronaut selection without telling his wife, and also wrote the National Defence Academy (NDA) entrance exam without informing his parents. When he first drove to Uttarakhand's Dehradun to enlist, his father's send-off was just four words, "If you want to, go."

A year after becoming the first Indian to fly to the International Space Station (ISS), Group Captain Shukla has written a book titled 'The Second Orbit' about all of it. It launched on June 25, exactly a year after the Axiom-4 mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Centre in the US.

"It makes it easier to go and do it first and then tell everybody else about it, I feel," he told NDTV's Gargi Rawat.

"I really wanted it (the book) to be human, the story, because the main intent was for it to be connected to people when they read it," he said.

Alongside orbital mechanics and mission protocols, he writes about his wife's reaction when he got the call, the strangeness of leaving his family for a year and what it felt like to walk into NASA for the first time.

Group Captain Shukla said he kept a journal throughout including audio notes, written logs and whatever was available on the advice of people who had done this before. "All of that was chronicled in some ways. A lot of those things helped me in writing this book."

From the launch pad back to a swimming pool at the NDA, where a 10-metre jump taught him something he would only fully understand decades later, the book has it all. "There may be moments of anxiousness, but how do you cross that bridge and how do you move forward?" The launch felt the same way, he added.

Back then, somewhere in the Crew Dragon capsule on the way to the ISS, Group Captain Shukla got cold since the temperature in the capsule ran low. He had already put on every piece of clothing available and his spacesuit, once removed, got packed into a large cloth bag. Group Captain Shukla looked at the bag that looked spacious.

"I tried getting inside it gradually, put my legs inside and then I found there was more space. So I kept going inside it."

He fell asleep with his head visible below the seat and then microgravity did what it does - he drifted, rotated and wedged himself into a corner, face-first and invisible from the front. When the crew woke up for breakfast, they could not find him. In nine cubic metres of pressurised space, they had lost an astronaut.

"Imagine that, losing an astronaut in a capsule," Group Captain Shukla said, adding they had to physically pull him out of the bag.

The book ends with a letter to his 14-year-old self, with a small reassurance about hair which he had struggled his entire childhood to get it to sit right. "I tried everything. Nothing worked," he said, and told children not to worry about it.

"I have been very fortunate to have gotten the opportunities and what I have been able to do for myself, for my service, for my country."

On the overview effect, a well-documented shift in perception that astronauts report after seeing Earth from outside, Group Captain Shukla said it was not possible for him to convey the feeling. "We cannot imagine something which is completely new for us."

The first thought that came to him, looking down, was that the planet is one thing, and not countries or borders. "This is home. That feeling is not forced. It is a very natural experience."

He said if you ever met an alien, how would you introduce yourself? "They would only recognise Earth. They wouldn't recognise anything else."

Gaganyaan, the crewed spaceflight programme, is scheduled to launch Indian astronauts on a homegrown rocket from Indian soil. It will be followed by the Bharatiya Antariksha Station, and a lunar landing is on the policy books for 2040.

"It is not going to be another 41 years before another Indian goes to space. It will be much sooner."