Moment When Axiom-4 Mission Piloted By Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla Docked At International Space Station

Axiom-4 Mission: The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts, including India's Shubanshu Shukla as part of the Axiom-4 mission, docked at the International Space Station Thursday evening, completing a 28-hour flight from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The docking point is 424km above the northern Atlantic Ocean. Watch the mission crew and NASA astronauts open the hatches. 

The ‘soft capture,’ initial contact between the capsule and ISS, was confirmed at around 4.03pm by the Mission Control. Axiom-4's historic space journey began at 12.01 pm on Wednesday, June 25, when SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A, the same site that launched Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission.

Docking is the procedure by which a spacecraft connects to the space station and before that, it is important for the spacecraft to rendezvous with the space station, meaning they must both be in the same orbital plane and be positioned close to each other. 

Axiom-4 Mission

The mission is a commercial collaboration between NASA, SpaceX, and Axiom Space, with support from ISRO.

The mission is special for India as we got our second space traveler, Shubhanshu Shukla, after a 41-year break, making this a momentous journey. With this, Shubhanshu has also become the first Indian to reach the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission. 

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, carrying Shukla (Mission Pilot) and three other international crewmembers including Commander Peggy Whitson (USA), Mission Specialist Slawosz Uznanski Wisniewski (Poland), and Mission Specialist Tibor Kapu (Hungary) has docked successfully after the 28-hour hectic journey. 

The crew will spend 14 days aboard the ISS, conducting many scientific experiments in the space station.