Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla on Wednesday became the second Indian citizen to go into space after Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma.

Shukla flew the Axiom Mission 4 to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and will spend eight days there.

On the day that the Indian space mission took a giant leap forward, it is important to remember the person who created the foundation, then Squadron Leader and later Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma.

Here are 5 facts about the first Indian citizen in space

• Born on January 13, 1949, in Punjab’s Patiala, Rakesh Sharma entered the National Defence Academy (NDA) in 1966 and was commissioned as a pilot into the Indian Air Force (IAF) in 1970.
• Sharma and two Soviet Union astronauts went to space on April 2, 1984, onboard a Soyuz T-11 rocket. The eight-day mission to the Salyut 7 space station was a joint effort of ISRO and the Soviet Intercosmos.
• Rakesh Sharma took Indian food to space with the help of Mysore’s Defence Food Research Lab. During his stay, he shared delicacies like sooji halwa, aaloo chholey, and pulao with his fellow space travellers that the lab packed for him. He also performed ‘zero gravity yoga’, probably the first to do so.
• When asked by the then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi how India looked from space, he famously recited a line from Allama Iqbal’s poem, telling the PM ‘Saare Jahan Se Accha’ (Better than the whole world). He also told her that the best times in space to look at the Earth were sunrise and sunset.
• Apart from getting the distinction of being the first Indian in space, Sharma also became the first Indian to receive the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’. His fellow Russian cosmonauts were awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award.