Rakesh Sharma, who is the first Indian cosmonaut, said that “We’ve got aliens living on this planet.”
Traveling to space aboard a Soviet rocket made Indian cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma realize the importance of caring for our own planet, he told RT in a new interview. While Sharma said that he looks forward to making contact with extraterrestrial life, he added that a certain kind of “alien” already lives on Earth.
Sharma was a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force when he was selected in 1982 to train with the USSR’s Interkosmos space program. Two years later he became the first Indian citizen in space when he blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz rocket bound for the Salyut 7 space station.
Being in space “gives you a wider perspective of your own existence,” Sharma told RT in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. “You return…a lot more mindful about the fact that there is no other place which is as comfortable as planet Earth, and therefore we really need to look after it and take care of [its] resources and use them frugally.”
Sharma is not the only space traveler to return with a newfound perspective on Earth’s fragility. American astronaut Edgar MItchell famously remarked that gazing down at our planet made him “want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b***h!”
According to NASA, tomatoes that were grown on the International Space Station have been brought back to Earth on the Dragon spacecraft.