Overview
- Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla landed at Delhi’s IGI Airport in the early hours of August 17 and was greeted by Union Minister Jitendra Singh, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and ISRO Chairman V Narayanan as cheering crowds looked on.
- Parliament will hold a three-hour special discussion in the Lok Sabha on August 18 entitled "India’s first astronaut aboard the International Space Station – Critical role of the space programme for Viksit Bharat by 2047."
- Shukla is set to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and will visit his hometown Lucknow before returning to New Delhi for National Space Day celebrations on August 22–23.
- Experiment samples and debrief findings from the Axiom-4 mission have been processed and shipped to India as direct inputs for ISRO’s upcoming Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme.
- The Axiom-4 flight, conducted with Axiom Space, NASA and SpaceX, underscores growing India–US collaboration and private-sector involvement in India’s crewed space ambitions, making Shukla the second Indian in space after Rakesh Sharma.