From BBC
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Jubilant Indians have been celebrating the successful launch of the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission which has taken off with a multi-country crew, including an Indian astronaut.
Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, who’s piloting the mission, has become only the second Indian to travel to space.
In just over 26 hours – when the spacecraft docks at the International Space Station (ISS) – Group Captain Shukla will become the first ever Indian to visit Nasa’s orbiting laboratory.
His trip comes 41 years after cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to fly to space aboard a Russian Soyuz in 1984.
Led by former Nasa astronaut Peggy Whitson – a space veteran who has been commander of ISS twice, has spent more than 675 days in space and done 10 space walks – Ax-4 lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 02:31 EDT, (06:31 GMT; 12:01 India time) on Wednesday.
The trip to ISS aboard Ax-4 – a commercial flight operated by Houston-based private company Axiom Space – is a collaboration between Nasa, India’s space agency Isro, European Space Agency (Esa) and SpaceX.
Its four-member team also includes Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski from Poland and Tibor Kapu from Hungary. They will also be taking their countries back to space after more than four decades. The astronauts spent weeks in quarantine before Wednesday’s launch.
The flight has generated huge interest in India with Isro saying the experience Group Captain Shukla will gain during his trip to the ISS will