Astronaut 004: Sirisha Bandla, 3rd Indian-origin woman set to fly to space

34-year-old Indian-origin aeronautical engineer Sirisha Bandla will fly to space on Sunday as part of Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed flight test. She will be the third Indian-origin woman, after after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, to go to space with English billionaire Sir Richard Branson.

Sirisha Bandla was born in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district and brought up in Houston, Texas. She and five others on board Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity will make a journey to the edge of space from New Mexico.

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She tweeted, “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.”

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Bandla will be astronaut no 004 and her flight role will be Researcher Experience, according to her profile on Virgin Galactic.

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In a video posted by Virgin Galactic on Twitter, the Indian-origin engineer said she was speechless when she got to know about this opportunity. “This is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies and different communities into space,” she added.

Bandla is a Purdue University alumna and she will be evaluating the human-tended research experience, using an experiment from the University of Florida that requires several handheld fixation tubes that will be activated at various points in the flight profile, a statement on the Galactic website said.

She joined Virgin Galactic in January 2021 as started as the vice-president of government affairs and research operations.

Bandla grew up in Houston, near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and always wanted to become an astronaut. But poor eyesight meant she could not meet the requirements to become a pilot or an astronaut, derailing her high-school plan to go the Air Force-to-NASA route, she said in the statement.