Rakesh Sharma recalls journey to the stars; 'space flight was never on my radar'
Telegraph | 5 September 2025
Fifty pilots had assembled at an air force academy in Bengaluru in the early 1980s, unaware of why they had been huddled there when the news broke that two of them would be selected for a space flight.
The young wing commander Rakesh Sharma, who eventually made it to become the first Indian to land in space, was in the room. All the 50 pilots “gasped in unison”, Sharma still remembers vividly.
Sharma was in the city recently to deliver a talk on leadership organised by The Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry in association with The Telegraph, when he took the audience back to the preparatory days of the space mission.
“It was hush-hush. We were told we would need to volunteer for the project. The obvious question was — to volunteer for what? The not-so-obvious answer was ‘we cannot tell you’,” Sharma said as the climax started to build. “No fighter pilot will step back from this kind of challenge and uncertainty, least of all a test pilot. It was a perfect hook. Some fifty of us fell for the hook,” he said.
“We were asked to report to the Institute of Aerospace Medicine, still located in Bengaluru. That was where we were told only two would be selected for the space flight with the Soviet Union. Everyone in the hall gasped in unison,” he said.
Innumerable medical examinations followed, first in India for the entire group of fifty, and then in Moscow for four shortlisted pilots.
“Various kinds of medical tests, scopies, scans, and various imaging devices were used, of which X-rays were the least invasive. A Soviet specialist flew down from Moscow, scanned the medical data, and 50 were whittled down to just four. Four of us were flown to Moscow for more medical tests,” said Sharma.
“At the end, only two of us were left. Ravish Malhotra, who was educated here in Calcutta, and I,” he said.
Malhotra served as backup for the mission, though he did not make it to space on this mission.
Sharma journeyed into space in April 1984 aboard the Soyuz T-11 rocket, spending eight days in space on the joint India-Soviet Union mission.
The two underwent training at Star City, about 70km from Moscow, for 18 months, which included two harsh Russian winters. “It took 18 months. We had to deal with two Russian winters when the mercury dipped to -25 to -30 degrees Celsius. During training, we had to walk thrice a day in ankle-deep snow,” he said.
Sharma lauded India’s progress in space missions as a success, “not bad for a developing country that continues to be torn apart by petty politics and factionalism.”
During a fireside chat after the talk, the president of Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Arnab Basu, prodded Sharma to reveal his other side as a fighter pilot. How was his experience during the 1971 war with Pakistan, Basu asked.
“I had only 50 hours’ experience of flying MIG-21. I do not know why my commanding officer thought that was enough for me to fly operational missions. Quite frankly, I was underprepared mentally and from skills standpoint. I will consider myself lucky that there was no serious engagement,” Sharma said.
“I had the thrill or experience of going into Pakistan and sweeping at medium altitude, showing ourselves on their radar, in the hope that their interceptors would come to get into a dogfight with us, but that never happened, thankfully for me,” he said with a smile.
“My limited aim was to fly fighter aircraft. Space flight was never on my radar as India did not have a manned space programme. When I got commissioned in the Indian Air Force, I was looking for more challenging things, which is why I took the test flight route,” Sharma said.