New Delhi: Indian Origin American astronaut Sunita Williams is ready to fly into space again and this time on a new aircraft, Boeing Starliner. The liftoff is scheduled to take place on May 7 2024 at 8:04 am India time from Kennedy Space Centre. Williams said that she is a little nervous but has no jitters about flying a new spacecraft. While training at the new space centre Williams said ” “When I reach the International Space Station, it will be like going back home.”
The 58-year-old, who was born into a family consisting of Dr Deepak and Bonnie Pandya, will make history as the first female pilot of a newly designed human-rated spacecraft. She has two space flights under her belt as a certified naval test pilot, in 2006 and 2012; according to NASA data, “Sunita has spent a cumulative total of 322 days in space.”
She once held a record for maximum spacewalk time by a female astronaut as she spent 50 hours and 40 minutes across seven spacewalks. According to NASA, Sunita set a record for the longest cumulative spacewalk duration by a female astronaut during her seven spacewalks, which amounted to fifty hours and forty minutes. However, Peggy Whitson has since surpassed her with ten spacewalks.
Sunita William’s father was a neuroanatomist born in Jhulasan, in Mehsana District, Gujarat, but later migrated to the USA and married Bonnie Pandya, a Slovenian. NASA has said that she is currently preparing to be the pilot of the crew flight test mission aboard Boeing’s Starliner the first crewed flight for that vehicle and her third mission aboard the international space station. She was chosen in 1998 to be an astronaut, and in 2015, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle, she was included in the exclusive group of astronauts to serve on NASA’s commercial crew program.
Ms Williams in a conversation with NDTV had said that she would carry a statue of lord Ganesha with her on the commercial crew flight as Ganesha is her good luck charm and that she was more spiritual than religious and was happy to have Lord Ganesh with her in outer space. On her earlier flights, she has carried copies of the Bhagavad Gita to space. She also said she loved samosas! Among her other passions, she is also a marathon runner and ran a marathon while at the ISS.
India has its spaceflight programme, the Gaganyaan. India has selected a crew of four male Gaganyatris and if all goes well they may fly into the space from Sriharikota around 2026. NASA has chosen SpaceX and Boeing to make new spacecraft which would ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and Space X has been doing this since 2020. The Boeing Starliner has had many delays and is now set for the maiden crew flight on Tuesday morning. However recent events show that Boeing is facing with lot of faults in its aircraft and the company is surrounded by controversy.
She will be travelling with Navy test pilot Barry Eugene “Butch” Wilmore, a 61-year-old astronaut with two spaceflights under his belt. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the two veterans will lift out for the International Space Station. According to NASA, the astronauts will stay in the orbiting laboratory for around a week until the crew capsule lands in the southwest of the country using an airbag and a parachute.
It’s interesting to note that Ms. Williams chose the name “Calypso” for the spacecraft she would pilot, emulating the well-known vessel that renowned French oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau used to explore the oceans when she was still a student. Boeing claims that the Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 Starliner spacecraft can carry seven passengers on low-Earth orbit flights, or a combination of crew and cargo.
It has undergone numerous setbacks and has been in the works for almost ten years. She has her fingerprints all over the new spaceship, having worked with engineers from Boeing and NASA to construct it, and she is about to make history when she flies it on its inaugural journey.
