Due to a delay, the Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and three other crew members will now launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 8 at 6:41 pm IST.

Originally, the mission was supposed to launch on May 29.

NASA and Axiom Space, a commercial human spaceflight company located in the United States, made the announcement.

“NASA and its partners are rearranging launch possibilities for a number of planned missions after examining the @Space_Station flight schedule. Pending operational preparedness, the following are the new targeted opportunities that are not sooner than launch: In an X post, NASA said, “Axiom Mission 4: 9:11 am EDT, Sunday, June 8.”

Four decades after Rakesh Sharma’s historic journey on board Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in 1984, Shukla is making his first trip to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

The Ax-4 crew, which also includes individuals from Poland and Hungary, is the second government-sponsored human spaceflight mission in almost 40 years and each country’s first-ever trip to the ISS.

In order to promote microgravity research in India, which aims to construct its own space station by 2035 and transport humans to the moon by 2047, Shukla will carry out seven experiments in space.

ISRO has developed plans to conduct tests on Indian-centric foods on the ISS, such as growing moong (green gram) and methi (fenugreek) in microgravity.

The European Space Agency (ESA) project astronaut Slawosz Uznanski, the second Polish astronaut since 1978, will also be aboard the Axiom-4 (Ax-4) mission.

Since 1980, Tibor Kapu will be the second Hungarian national astronaut.

To set a new record for the longest total time spent in space by an American astronaut, Peggy Whitson will lead her second commercial human spaceflight mission.

The Ax-4 crew will arrive at the space station on a SpaceX Dragon spaceship and stay there for up to 14 days.