THE PHONE CALL came one morning in 2024. Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla’s voice was calm as he told his parents something that would change everything: he had been selected as the prime mission pilot for the commercial crew flight to the International Space Station.
For a moment, time stood still. But this was not the first time their son had left them speechless. “Twice in my life, time had seemed to stop,” Shubhanshu would later tell 400 spellbound students at his old school. He was reflecting on moments that shaped him. The first came when returning home after an exam, only to find his mathematics teacher’s scooter in the yard. He was worried that he had not done well, and failed his parents. Shubhanshu always had high expectations about himself. The second was in a fighter jet, pulling too steeply, with death waiting below.
What did those moments teach him? When you are completely committed to what you are doing, you can bend time itself.
“Whatever you want, you have to earn,” his parents, Shambhu Dayal, 73, and Asha, 68, used to tell their three children. They knew what they were talking about―they had built everything from nothing but determination and an unwavering partnership. In the Shukla household in Lucknow, dreams were not handed out. They had to be worked for. Their youngest son seemed to understand that better than anyone. While his sisters, Nidhi and Suchi, would hesitate before asking for permission to go out, Shubhanshu was different.
Nidhi recalls a story that perhaps explains how her little brother ended up heading for space. “He would come home late from cricket and papa would be furious. I would ask him, ‘Gunjan, aren’t you afraid?’ What he told me, I have never forgotten: ‘I was in the game at that moment. Had I thought about what papa would say, I would not have been able to give my 100 per cent there.’” Gunjan―meaning the chirping of birds―is what everyone calls Shubhanshu at home.
Even when he was just 10, Shubhanshu had grasped something essential: if you give your full attention to what you are doing now, you don’t have to fear what comes next.
At City Montessori School (Aliganj), he was the quiet boy who set impossibly high standards for himself. His childhood friend, Vishal Srivastava, remembers him as someone with just a few friends. His birthday parties often had more of Vishal’s friends than his own.
But Nidhi noticed something else during family outings to the cinema. “When we watched the Mission: Impossible films, he would jump out of his seat in excitement. That excitement with speed, with airplanes, was always there.” A visit to an air show gave him a glimpse of what he really wanted. Watching jets slice through the sky, something clicked. Nidhi thinks that he must have told himself: if I am going to chase speed, why not go for the ultimate?
Then fate intervened. A classmate had picked up the application form for the National Defence Academy but realised he was too old to apply. He handed the form to Shubhanshu, who filled it out casually. His parents did not mind. He didn’t appear to study hard for the exam taken by lakhs of students every year.
Family matters: Shubhanshu’s father, Shambhu Dayal Shukla, mother Asha and sister Suchi | Pawan Kumar
Somehow, he sailed through. “He was naturally gifted―his fundamentals were always clear,” Suchi recalls. “But he never studied hard. I used to be annoyed that he could cram the night before and still do well.”
By the time the second round―interviews and physical tests―came, his parents were less thrilled. They had civil services in mind for him, not the military. “See if you want to go,” they told him. They were pretty sure that their quiet boy would not want to travel alone for the exam.
But he surprised them. Every evening, he would call home to say that he cleared the day’s tests. Before they knew it, the son they thought would be with them the longest was getting ready to leave. “I always thought there would be more time,” Asha says, with a trace of regret. “I just could not give him the attention he deserved.”
The NDA didn’t just train Shubhanshu―it revealed who he really was. The thoughtful, quiet boy who left home came back completely different, yet somehow more himself than he had ever been. “After seeing his transformation, I wished there was a law requiring every citizen to undergo the training,” Nidhi says. The fine young man became a gentleman with discipline and steel.
The shift in him was so dramatic that it changed the family dynamics. The youngest became the one everyone turned to in a crisis. “No matter the situation, he is always calm,” Suchi explains. “Never confused, never unsure. Once he decides, he follows through. He will face the consequences later if needed.”
All that newfound strength came wrapped in incredible gentleness. Even though he calls his family every day, he has never once burdened them with his own struggles. The brutal training, career disappointments, physical challenges―he keeps it all to himself. What they hear instead is always the same: “Everything is perfect. I am doing great. Don’t worry about me.”
Nidhi remembers a time when they were in a car accident on the highway. She was terrified, clutching her baby, begging him to leave as a crowd started gathering around them. But her brother, then in his early 20s, would not budge. “Even if 5,000 people show up, I still have to do what is right,” he told her. “It would be wrong to just walk away.”
When Shubhanshu called Nidhi to tell her about the space mission, she went completely silent. When she finally found her voice, all she could say was: “This is magic. This has to be God’s special grace.” His response was typical of him. “I am not just going for myself. I am carrying everyone’s dreams up there with me.”
Instead of celebrating and making a big fuss, the family decided to protect his focus. “From that day, we started telling him to forget he even has a mother, father and sisters,” Suchi remembers. “We stopped sharing our problems with him. We told him: ‘Your only job now is to focus on this mission.’”
Success has not changed Shubhanshu. When he visited his old school after the selection, he immediately spotted his 90-year-old former principal Gauri Khanna and rushed over to touch her feet.
His best friend Vishal, who will join a family video call when Shubhanshu is floating around in space, says nothing has changed about their friendship. “When we talk, I am not talking to some famous astronaut and he is not talking like he is a big shot. He is just Shubhanshu, I am just Vishal, and we chat about everything―just like we always have.”
Both have been friends since they were four. Vishal recalled an incident from school when his friend broke his hand while riding a two-wheeler. Terrified at how his mother would react, Shubhanshu lied that it was actually Vishal who was riding the vehicle. “His family probably doesn’t know the truth till date,” says Vishal.
Vishal is his school’s first entrant into the National Institute of Fashion Technology where he studied garment engineering. It’s serendipity at play again as that has become Vishal’s connection to the space mission. He roped in his alma mater at Bengaluru to design the uniform that the four astronauts selected for the Gaganyaan mission wore when Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented them their astronaut wings in February 2024.
The school has another connection to the mission as its badge has been designed by yet another alumnus, Manish Tripathi, the designer who makes the garments for Ram Lalla at the new temple in Ayodhya. “Shubhanshu always talks of solutions, never of problems. Even if there is something he does not like, he puts it across in a manner that doesn’t hurt any ego,” says Manish, who was two years junior to Shubhanshu in school. He is pushing Shubhanshu to play hero in a comic book.
Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, the manager of the City Montessori School, speaks about Shubhanshu’s wit and the ease with which he interacted with students. “It was a super charged electric atmosphere,” she said. And in a school that has 62,500 students across 21 campuses, the impact was intense. When the school subsequently organised an online discussion on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), for which Shubhanshu sent a recorded message, 21,000 students from across campuses tuned in.
Back at the family home, where the only hint of Shubhanshu’s intensive training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia is a small set of Russian nesting dolls sitting in a cabinet, the same rules still apply. “We have always believed that your most basic responsibility is to be a good person,” Suchi explains. “It doesn’t matter what else you achieve in life. Above everything else, you have to be good.”
Shambhu Dayal, the man who always told his son that everything worthwhile has to be earned, is thrilled that his boy has earned his place among the stars. Asha remains incredibly happy to see everything she built from nothing launching into space.
And the proud parents have come to understand what Shubhanshu figured out all those years ago on the school playground: when you are completely committed to doing what is right, you don’t have to worry about what comes next. The boy who refused to leave a game unfinished was always preparing for this―the ultimate game that he could never quit early.
“Some people are born to stay on the ground. Some people are born to touch the sky,” both sisters say. “We always knew that Gunjan was meant for both.”