New Delhi: As Shubhanshu Shukla boarded the International Space Station late Thursday evening, he was presented with his orbital flight number by Commander Peggy Whitson: Number 634. This marked Indian astronaut Shukla as the 634th human to have orbited the Earth.
“I am number 634—well, now, that’s a privilege,” said Shukla to a round of laughs from the ISS and Axiom crew. “But truly, it is a privilege to be one of the few that have seen the Earth from the vantage point that I’ve been able to,” he added.
Whitson went on to give the other two first-time astronauts on Ax-4, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, their orbital astronaut pins—a small gold symbol with two rays emerging out of a 5-pointed star, enclosed by a gold circle. They became numbers 635 and 636, respectively.
The gold pin that represents orbital flight completion by a human being is known as the Universal Astronaut Insignia. It was developed in 2015 by the international body Association of Space Explorers (ASE). The founders of ASE—Andy Turnage and Michael Lapez Algeria—wanted to create a symbol that could represent and be worn by space travellers across the world, no matter what country or what agency they belonged to.
“Sixty years after the flight of Yuri Gagarin, there’s still no official universal insignia for astronauts and cosmonauts who fly into space,” said Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi in an interview in 2021. “Now, the ASE has conceived, designed, and approved a symbol which all space travellers shall be eligible to display,” he added.
Noguchi took the first-ever orbital astronaut pin to space as part of the Expedition 64 to the International Space Station. This pin was then presented to the family of Yuri Gagarin as a symbolic gesture to mark his first-ever flight to space in 1961.
India’s astronaut Rakesh Sharma, who travelled aboard Soyuz-T10 and became the first Indian in space, received the 138th orbital pin. Joining these ranks now is Shubhanshu Shukla, with his gold pin shining on his lapel as he sets about conducting research experiments for the next two weeks on the ISS.
History of astronaut pins
The ASE has two different types of pins to mark both orbital and sub-orbital flights by astronauts. An orbital flight, which is what was completed by Shukla and the Ax-4 crew, is when a spacecraft completes a full orbit of the Earth. A sub-orbital flight is when a spacecraft crosses the limit to reach space, but does not complete a full orbit.
This space limit is nominally seen as 100 kms above sea level, and is known as the Karman Line. This is the line that the recent Blue Origin all-female spacecraft with Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez and Gayle King crossed. These astronauts also received a pin from the ASE, however, unlike Shukla’s, their pins did not have the enclosing gold circle.
Before the ASE, different organisations of different countries, like NASA, would present their astronauts with individually designed pins. The first-ever astronaut pins in the US were provided to the crew of the Mercury 7 Mission in 1961, who were the first astronaut-designates and some of the first Americans to go to space.
By 1964, a modified version of this pin was designed by NASA, which is used to this date and is given to astronauts in training and in flight. It is a star with rays emerging from it, with a circle at the bottom. After NASA astronauts complete their astronaut training, they receive a silver pin. Once they fly to space, they receive a gold one.
Currently, two silver NASA pins reside on the Moon—belonging to NASA astronauts Alan Bean and Clifton Williams. On Bean’s 1969 visit to the Moon, he carried Williams’ pin with him, to honour the astronaut who had tragically passed away in 1967 in a jet crash. Williams had never made it to space.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)