Shubhanshu Shukla on Thursday became the 634th astronaut to travel to space and the first to enter the International Space Station (ISS) after a journey of 28 hours. He has carried with him the hopes of Indians after 41 long years, after Rakesh Sharma’s historic feat in 1984. The Indian Air Force (IAF) officer entered the ISS with a “Jai Hind Jai Bharat” message. “With your love and blessings, I have reached the International Space Station. It looks easy to stand here, but my head is a little heavy, facing some difficulty; but these are minor issues,” Shukla said in his very first message in Hindi at the formal welcome ceremony at the ISS. “We will get used to it. This is the first step of this journey,” he added. A live video link from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) showed the four-member multi-nation crew of Axiom-4 emerging from the Dragon spacecraft named ‘Grace’. They came out less than two hours after the sequence of docking with the ISS was completed at 4.15 pm IST. The spacecraft was put into a low-earth orbit by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket that was launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida at 12.01 pm on Wednesday. The crew got a warm welcome of smiles and hugs from the members of Expedition 73. Peggy Whitson, a veteran astronaut, floated into the space station at 5:53 pm followed by Shukla, the mission pilot, with Polish engineer Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a mission specialist and a European Space Agency project astronaut, and Hungary’s Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer and the mission specialist, close behind, reported PTI. “I am astronaut 634. It is a privilege to be here,” Shukla said. He said over the next 14 days, the team will conduct scientific experiments and interact with people on Earth. “This is also a phase of India’s space journey. I will keep talking to you. Let us make this journey exciting. I am carrying the tiranga and I am carrying all of you with me. The next 14 days will be exciting,” he added. In a post on X, NASA said, “The #Ax4 crew — commander Peggy Whitson, ISRO astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, ESA astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, and mission specialist Tibor Kapu — emerges from the Dragon spacecraft and gets their first look at their home in low Earth orbit.”