Sanjal Gavande, the Indian link to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space rocket

Sanjal Gavande from Maharashtra’s Kalyan is among the team of engineers that built Blue Origin’s suborbital space rocket New Shephard. The rocket will take billionaire Jeff Bezos and three others to space on July 20. Earlier, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which became the first privately-built rocket to go to space, also had a strong India connect with one of the passengers being Indian-born Sirisha Bandla

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Gavande, 30, is a systems engineer at Blue Origin, the spaceflight services company, and was born in Kalyan.  “I am really happy that my childhood dream is about to come true. I am proud to be a part of Team Blue Origin,” Ms Gavande told Times of India.

Gavande’s mother Surekha told the website that their daughter had been interested in Space from the very childhood. Surekha is a retired employee of MTNL and her husband Ashok Gavande, a retired employee of the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation.

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After graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai, Sanjal Gavande left for the United States to study mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University. “She worked with Mercury Marine after finishing her Masters at Wisconsin. Then she went to work with Toyota racing development at Orange City in California,” her father told India Today.

Gavande’s NASA dream suffered an initial setback after her job application was rejected due to citizenship issues, her mother added. She already had a flying licence and decided to apply for a job at Blue Origin and was appointed a systems engineer.

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Earlier this month, Sirisha Bandla from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh joined Branson and five others in the first-ever private flight to space. Bandla, 34, was brought up in Houston, Texas. Interested in space and science from the very childhood, Bandla studied at Indiana’s Purdue University’s school of aeronautics and astronautics.

She later joined Branson’s Virgin Galactic and rose to become the vice-president of government affairs at the company. Bandla was astronaut 004 on the VSS Unity and was picked to test researcher experience.