Astronaut Sunita Williams said she plans to visit India soon, and meet with ISRO’s team during her visit.
Williams said during NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Post-Flight News Conference that she found India to be ‘amazing’ each time her spacecraft passed by the Himalayas during her nine-month stay in space.
“I hope and I think for sure I’m going to be going back to my father’s home country and visiting with people and getting excited about the Indian astronauts who’s going up on the ISRO mission coming up,” she said.
Sunita Williams’ mother, Ursuline Bonnie Pandya, is of Slovenian-American descent, while her father, Deepak Pandya, is from Gujarat. Williams said she would love to share her experience in space with ISRO and that it was great how India put its foot forward in the space sector by being a fellow democracy.
“[It’s] pretty awesome- they’ll have a hometown hero there of their own that will be able to talk about how wonderful the International Space Station is from his perspective,” she said. “I hope I can meet up at some point in time and we can share our experiences with as many people in India as possible because it’s a great country, another wonderful democracy that’s trying to put its foot in the space countries and I would love to be part of that and help them along,” she added.
When asked if she planned to take her crew along on her impending trip to India, she responded in the affirmative and jested, saying the crew would be primed with spicy food. “Absolutely! You might stick out a little bit, but that’s okay – we’ll get you all primed with some spicy food, we’ll be good,” she said.
Williams said that she could see India’s geographical formation when the landmass collided to form the Himalayas, and as a ripple effect, India was formed.
“India is amazing. Every time we went over the Himalayas, we got some incredible pictures of the Himalayas- so just amazing. Like I’ve described it before, just like this ripple happened. Obviously, when the plates collided, and then as it flows down into India. It’s many, many colors,” she said.
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Williams talked about India’s diversity, which is visible from space, from the Himalayas, to a different culture from the East, and from the fishing fleet in the West. “I think when you come from the East, going into like Gujarat and Mumbai, the fishing fleet that’s off the coast there gives you a little bit of a beacon that here we come! Throughout India,” she said.
Williams said the country looked like a network of lights, with major cities being the brightest, and waning down towards smaller cities. “I think the impression I had was that it was just like this network of lights from the bigger cities going down through the smaller cities. [It was] just incredible to look at night and during the day. Highlighted, of course, by the Himalayas, which is just incredible as a forefront going down into India,” she said.
NASA Crew-9 astronauts Sunita Williams, Nick Hague, Butch Wilmore, and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov breathed earthly air for the first time in over nine months on March 19 after the successful splashdown of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Delays caused by issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which surfaced during a test flight piloted by Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams last summer, led to the astronaut duo remaining in space for nine months instead of a week, CNN reported.
At that time, ISRO expressed its desire to collaborate with Williams in future space missions. “When Bharat, under the leadership of Hon’ble PM Modi ji, is working towards making India a developed country, we wish to utilise your expertise in space exploration,” it said.
