NEW DELHI – More than four decades after the first person from India went to space, the nation is finally about to have a sequel. 

Mr Shubhanshu Shukla, an Indian Air Force test pilot, will be one of four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on a flight scheduled to launch on June 11 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The mission will be operated by Texas-based start-up Axiom Space and will have a multinational crew that will also include Commander Peggy Whitson of the US, Mission Specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and Mission Specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary. They will spend as many as 14 days at the International Space Station (ISS).

No Indian has been in orbit since Mr Rakesh Sharma, who flew on a Soviet rocket in 1984, and the return to space has created a flurry of excitement in the South Asian nation.

In Mr Shukla’s hometown of Lucknow, about 560km east of New Delhi, posters wishing him luck dot the city and passers-by stop and take selfies with his cut-outs. 

Local media reported how Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe, part of a 2022 Axiom mission to the ISS, met Mr Shukla’s family in May and addressed their anxieties. 

Mr Shukla’s flight will be the opening act for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s space ambitions in the coming years as his government tries to narrow the gap with nations such as China, which operates its own space station and has plans for a crewed lunar mission by 2030. 

India landed a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s south pole in 2023, and the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) aims to launch Mr Shukla and three other Indian astronauts on one of the agency’s own rockets in 2027 for India’s first crewed space mission.

Other plans include Nisar, a joint US-India Earth-observation mission that Nasa and Isro are targeting to launch this month in June from the Indian agency’s space centre in Sriharikota, near Chennai.

Isro also wants to create an Indian space station by 2035 and put an Indian astronaut on the moon by 2040. 

India’s decision to deepen its space exploration efforts has won support from the global space community.

In May, the European Space Agency signed a statement of intent to cooperate with Isro on space exploration and a delegation from Japan’s space...