When Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla walked into a packed auditorium at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad this week, the students in the room weren’t just meeting a fighter pilot who became an astronaut. They were meeting one of the handful of Indians who have actually flown to space — and he had come to tell them the next chapter of India’s space programme depends on them.
Shukla, a member of the historic Axiom-4 mission and one of India’s leading astronauts, addressed students, faculty and researchers at the IIT-H campus in Kandi as part of the institute’s Extra Mural Lectures initiative. The session traced his own path from flying fighter jets in the Indian Air Force to representing the country in human spaceflight, and used that arc to make a direct pitch: India’s most ambitious space projects will only get built if today’s engineering students choose to build them.
From cockpit to orbit
Shukla walked the audience through what astronaut training actually demands — the physical conditioning, the psychological preparation, and the sheer unfamiliarity of operating in microgravity, one of the most demanding environments humans have ever tried to work in. He described life aboard a space mission not as a single dramatic moment but as an extended exercise in discipline, problem-solving under pressure, and constant learning, qualities he argued are as valuable in a lab or design workshop as they are in orbit.
Rather than treating spaceflight as an exotic outlier career, Shukla framed it as the product of the same scientific temper, teamwork and persistence that underpins any serious engineering pursuit — the difference being the environment in which those skills eventually get tested.
Why the timing matters
The appeal landed at a particular moment for India’s space ambitions. The country is working toward building the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, its own space station, and sending an Indian astronaut to the Moon — both flagship goals that will require a far larger and more specialised workforce than India’s space programme has needed before. Shukla told students plainly that those projects would remain aspirations on paper unless enough of them chose to work on making them real.
IIT-H Director Prof. B.S. Murty, who welcomed Shukla to the campus, framed the interaction as exactly the kind of exposure engineering students need beyond what a classroom can offer — a chance to see, up close, what a career at the frontier of a national technological effort actually looks like, and to be pushed toward thinking bigger and taking more innovative risks as a result.
Curiosity as the entry point
The session closed with an extended question-and-answer exchange, as students pressed Shukla on how astronauts are actually selected, what life in microgravity feels like day to day, and where India’s expanding space sector might create openings for people entering the field now. That last question may be the most consequential one in the room: India’s space economy is scaling up rapidly, from crewed missions to satellite manufacturing to launch services, and the gap between the number of specialists it will need and the number currently in the pipeline is exactly the gap Shukla was there to try to close.
His message, in effect, wasn’t just biographical — it was recruitment. The Bharatiya Antariksh Station and an Indian footprint on the Moon aren’t distant government promises, he suggested; they’re engineering problems waiting for people willing to spend a career solving them.
