From space station, Shukla leaves children mesmerised

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

When Shuchi Mishra saw her brother floating in the International Space Station during their video call on Thursday, she recognised something familiar. 'I felt a similar spark in his eyes as I used to see when he was a child,' she said of Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla. 'He was curious, exploring everything and wanting to show us everything.'
The tele-bridge connection had brought the Shukla family face to face with their astronaut son and brother for the first time since his launch on June 25. His mother Asha was overwhelmed as Shubhanshu guided them through his orbital home, showing them how he lived, ate, and even slept floating against walls in a sleeping bag. His father Shambu Dayal watched with a mixture of pride and relief—the first three days had been difficult for his son as he adapted to weightlessness.
'We are happy that he is now in a healthy zone because he found it difficult to adapt in the first three days,' Mishra said. The family had experienced their own form of weightlessness during the call, watching their loved one demonstrate life 400 kilometres above Earth. 'When the call ended, we could only say that he is our hero.'
On Thursday, Group Captain Shukla held live video conferences from the ISS, speaking with his family in Lucknow and with hundreds of school students. During the calls, he demonstrated daily life in microgravity, discussed the physical challenges of space adaptation, and shared details about eating, sleeping, and exercising in weightlessness.
The first minutes after launch had felt 'as if somebody pushed him hard on his seat,' Shukla told students during a separate video conference from his family. The subsequent days brought nausea and disorientation as his brain struggled to interpret motion without the gravitational cues it had relied upon for 39 years. His face had grown puffy as blood redistributed in microgravity, no longer pulled downward by Earth's relentless tug.
But by Thursday, speaking to over 500 students gathered at City Montessori School in Lucknow and others assembled in Thiruvananthapuram, Shukla had found his orbital rhythm. He described a day measured not by Earth's single sunrise but by sixteen, each orbit bringing another dawn and dusk in the span of 90 minutes. The students listened, mesmerised, as he explained how astronauts eat food in paste form to prevent crumbs from floating into sensitive equipment, and how water comes in spill-proof bottles with straws.
'The food we eat on Earth, for example a roti, cannot be eaten there as it can get in the suction pump in the ISS,' ten-year-old Divyansh Agrawal recounted after the call. The boy had been struck by Shukla's explanation of how a whole team on Earth decides what astronauts can safely consume in space.
Shatakshi Srivastava, a ninth-grade student, was fascinated by Shukla's tour of the exercise equipment designed to combat muscle loss. 'They have a couple of machines including a treadmill which they use while tying themselves to something and a cycle-like machine with no seat where they can pedal,' she said. The image that lingered most was Shukla's casual observation that he could sleep anywhere—ceiling, wall, wherever—simply by getting inside a sleeping bag and tying himself to something solid.
In Kerala, students selected from across the state based on their academic performance had gathered at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre for their own ten-minute window with the astronaut. 'He spoke about space travel, food, how he spends his free time at the space station, and the scientific experiments conducted there,' said Aditya, according to PTI. 'He also encouraged us to stay curious to learn and excel in science.'
Between conducting experiments and equipment maintenance, Shukla told students he finds moments to watch Earth pass beneath the station's windows.
For the Shukla family, watching their son and brother adapt to life in space had been 'electrifying and beyond our imagination,' as Mishra put it.
(With PTI inputs)