After Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, she became the third Indian-origin woman to fly into space. Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma is the only Indian who have been to space. On April 3, 1984, the former Indian Air Force pilot travelled aboard Soyuz T-11 as part of the Soviet Interkosmos programme. However with the mission of virgin galactic, Sirisha Bandla was able to secure a seat in its space flight
Ms Bandla moved to America when she was four years old and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2011. In 2015, she received her Master of Business Administration from George Washington University.
Sirisha Bandla aspired to be an astronaut for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States (NASA). However, due to her bad eyesight, she was unable to satisfy the qualifications to become a pilot or astronaut. Later when she was at Purdue University, a professor told her about a job opportunity in commercial spaceflight.
Bandla flew to the edge of space with Branson and four passengers on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity from New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic is a British-American spaceflight company that operates in the United States. Richard Branson established it, and his Virgin Group has a 24 percent interest. They have been building commercial spacecraft with the goal of providing space travelers with suborbital spaceflights.
The spaceplane, known as the VSS Unity of Virgin Galactic, took off for the 1.5-hour flight above New Mexico after a 90-minute delay due to poor weather.
The Virgin Galactic carrier can carry up to eight passengers (two pilots and six passengers) on the Unity 22 journey, however there were only six occupants on Sunday (two pilots and four passengers). VSS Unity is the company’s second SpaceShipTwo, following the failure of the first, VSS Enterprise, during a test flight in 2014, killing one pilot and badly wounding another.
Virgin Galactic has implemented several safety improvements to ensure that such a tragedy does not happen again. They were able to complete their scheduled journey without any errors
