Rakesh Sharma says he rarely revisits his 1984 spaceflight because he chose not to live with the experience: too much reflection, he says, can lead to imagining things that were not there. He described the mission as professional work and, when it ended, wanted to get on with his life.
Why Sharma chose not to dwell on the flight
In a retrospective interview published by Scroll.in on June 18, 2024, Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (retired) explained his approach plainly: “In retrospect, I think to not live with that experience was a personal choice. When you start thinking too much about it, you start imagining stuff which is not there. So I prefer not to do that.”
His explanation is a personal one, not a general claim about how astronauts remember or process spaceflight. He presents the choice as a way of avoiding imagined details, rather than as a judgment that the mission was unimportant.
A professional assignment, then a return to life
Sharma also pushed back on the larger-than-life image that public attention can attach to a space traveler. “You know, sometimes people and the media paint such a larger-than-life image of a person when things like this happen,” he told interviewer Pankaj Mishra. He described himself as one of a group of professionals who were selected and given a job: “once that is over, you want to get on with your life.”
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That framing helps explain why the flight did not become something he wanted to continually relive. He understood it as consequential work, but also as work with a defined end—not an identity he needed to keep performing after returning home.
What the time in orbit was like
Sharma said the flight schedule left little room for simply gazing out at Earth. “This whole game is so expensive that when you are up there, each minute of your time is curated; you have to do stuff, record the results, so there is really no time to put your nose to the window and watch the world go by!”
He nevertheless acknowledged that the experience affected him. In the interview, he reflected on Earth’s fragility and said, “space is a great place to visit, but there is no place like Earth to live on.” He also emphasized that recognizing humanity’s smallness in the universe does not require going to space. These are Sharma’s reflections, not scientific conclusions established by the interview.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The mission in context
The Indian Space Research Organisation’s timeline records the India–Soviet crewed space mission on April 2, 1984. ISRO also describes Sharma’s flight as a 1984 Soviet Soyuz flight. The date places his mission four decades before the 2024 interview.
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The interview excerpt comes from Pankaj Mishra’s book Against the Grain: Lessons from the Outliers, credited to Penguin India; the book is not presented as being solely about Sharma. In the excerpt, Sharma says he had been speaking about Earth and related topics “for the last 35 years”—a rounded recollection in the interview, rather than an exact measure of time since the flight.
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