Chennai: Aeronautical engineer Sirisha Bandla has become the third Indian-origin woman to fly into space when she joined British billionaire Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed suborbital test flight from New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, as the spaceplane is called, took off for the 1.5-hour mission above New Mexico following a 90-minute delay due to bad weather.
The 33-year-old woman has her roots in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur. Sirisha, vice president of government affairs and research operations at Branson’s Virgin Galactic is the third woman of Indian origin — after NASA astronauts Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams — to fly to space.
“From a very young age she had this ambition to explore the sky, the moon, and the stars. Sirisha had set her eyes on space, and I am not at all surprised that she is all set to realise her dream,” Sirisha’s grandfather Dr Bandla Nagaiah said.
“I am so incredibly honoured to be a part of the amazing crew of #Unity22, and to be a part of a company whose mission is to make space available to all,” she had tweeted, a few days before the take-off.
“When I first heard that I was getting this opportunity, it was just… I was speechless. I think that that probably captured it very well. This is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies and different communities into space,” she said in a video posted on the Twitter handle of Virgin Galactic.
The primary objective for Unity 22 was to serve as a test flight for future commercial passenger flights by Virgin Galactic.
Sirisha was born in Chirala in her maternal grandmother’s home. The family then moved to Tenali in Guntur. Till the age of 5, Sirisha spent time between Hyderabad where Nagaiah lived, and Tenali at her grandmother’s house.
Thereafter, she travelled to Houston to join her parents in the United States. Sirisha’s parents, who are US government employees, are currently posted in India.