Shubhanshu Shukla highlights importance of dental care for astronauts

Dental health is extremely important for astronauts, Shubhanshu Shukla, the first Indian to reach the International Space Station, has said, recalling that he had two wisdom teeth extracted while preparing for his space journey. Shukla said that although astronauts are trained to handle emergency medical situations, they cannot perform dental surgery on a spacecraft.

He was speaking at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay on Wednesday, along with Group Captain Prasanth Nair and Group Captain Angad Pratap, who have been shortlisted for ‘Gaganyaan’, the country’s first human spaceflight mission. Nair explained why test pilots of the Indian Air Force (IAF) are the natural choice for space trips.

Group Captain Shukla, an Indian Air Force (IAF) officer and test pilot, completed his maiden space voyage as part of the Axiom-4 mission, a commercial spaceflight supported by ISRO and NASA, and operated by Axiom Space, earlier this year.

“Your dental health is extremely important. During the selection, a lot (of aspiring astronauts) got their teeth extracted,” he said. Explaining further, Shukla said wisdom teeth are removed when one is trained to go to space.

“You are trained medically to take care of any emergency or any situation that comes on board because there is no ready help available. If there is one thing you cannot do is dental surgery. So they make sure that you will not have any problem before you launch,” he said. “I have had two of my wisdom teeth extracted,” the astronaut added.

He said Nair has three of his teeth extracted, while Pratap has four molars removed. “If you want to be an astronaut, you have to give up on your wisdom,” Shukla quipped.

He said the ace IAF pilots selected for the Gaganyaan mission underwent several psychological and physical evaluations before they were finally cleared for the mission. Group Captain Nair said that by the end of 2019, they were sent to Russia, where Russian doctors also carried out medical evaluations.

Explaining the decision to pick test pilots for the space mission, Group Captain Pratap said that all countries with robust space programmes and that have independently sent astronauts to space -- US, USSR, Russia and China -- have followed a similar path.

He said test pilots are themselves a select lot representing the best in the community. Every year, 200 IAF personnel apply to become test pilots and only five are selected, Pratap said.

For the Gaganyaan programme, the IAF considered 75 test pilots of which only four were selected, he said.

“We have not actually been selected to be sent to space, but we have been selected to be able to work daily on the ground, integrate ourselves with the designers and develop the system, which we are formally trained for.

“It is very easy to select test pilots and integrate them directly into the astronaut training programme because 70-80 per cent of our training resembles that of an astronaut training programme,” he said.