NEW DELHI: The endless void had called out to Sirisha Bandla since the time she was a child growing up in Houston, the seat of America’s manned space programme.
The Andhra-born girl knew then that one day she would head out to space, “no matter what”.
On Sunday (July 11), her rocket-fuelled dreams will come true.
Bandla (34) will be “Astronaut 004” on board Virgin Galactic’s space plane VSS Unity, flyingto the edge of space at about three and a half times the speed of sound along with Virgin founder Richard Branson (Astronaut 001) and four others in a fully crewed 90-minute sub-orbital flight.
“I feel like I am taking a bit of India up there with me,” she told TOI in an exclusive interaction from VG’s Spaceport America in New Mexico on Friday.
If all goes as planned, Bandla (34), a Trekkie, will be only the second India-born woman to go to space, after Nasa astronaut Kalpana Chawla who lost her life in the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.
The first Indian in space was the IAF’s Rakesh Sharma, who retired as a wing commander.
Bandla’s flight role is “researcher experience”.
She is Virgin Galactic’s vice-president of government affairs and research operations.
Bandla’s mother is bringing one of her favourite dishes, mutton biryani, to New Mexico before her daughter takes off to over 3 lakh feet above Earth.
Her all-time favourite is the Andhra yellow dal dish pappu.
When she returns, she plans to ask her mother to make it for her.
“That’s my comfort food, hot rice and yellow lentils with some ghee.
I, embarrassingly so, still can’t make it like her.” Born in Andhra’s Chirala, Bandla’s parents left with her for the US when she was 4.
“The love (for space) actually started when I lived in Houston, surrounded by Nasa.
I started looking at how people became astronauts and I tried to model my career after them,” Bandla said.
Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (retd) was a big influence.
“…sometimes you just need to share an identity with someone to kind of reduce mental barriers… (I tell myself) that’s something I could do because someone from my background and my culture has done it as well,” Bandla, an MBA who studied aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 2011 at Purdue University, said.
“I decided I was going to space no matter what.
I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but I was pretty sure I would make it there some day.
I credit that to my grandparents and my parents who have always encouraged me, pushed me to keep chasing my dream,” Bandla, who dreams to make “safely go where no tourist has gone before” possible, said.
“I hope I go to space many times and many others go there too,” the India-born astronaut said.
Besides Branson and her, the others on the spaceflight will be chief astronaut Beth Moses (Astronaut 002) and lead operations engineer Colin Bennett (Astronaut 003).
Branson, who turns 72 on July 18, will “evaluate customer spaceflight experience”.
SS Unity will be flown by pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.
The mothership VSS Eve (named for Branson’s mother), from which VSS Unity will drop when it reaches 50,000 feet, will be piloted by CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer.
Unity’s rocket engines will then ignite and carry Branson, Bandla and the four others higher than 50 miles (360,890 feet/110,000 metres) at about 4,300 kmph.
At the top of the arc, they will experience weightlessness for about four minutes before Unity re-enters the atmosphere and begins to glide back to Earth.
Sunday’s space mission appears to be the result of a race between two billionaires — Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — to get out there first.
Both own companies that are pushing frontiers to offer space voyages to tourists.
The Virgin Group founder will have made his flight nine days before Bezos when he lands on Sunday.
Bezos is scheduled to lift off in his space travel company Blue Origin’s New Shepard on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the first manned moon landing.
Branson describes his own spaceflight as not a race but “an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we’re going up in the same month”.
Asked about Bezos’ July 20 flight, and then spaceflights by Musk’s SpaceX in coming months, Bandla said: “I know this sounds fluffy but I think the more the merrier.
It’s actually absolutely incredible that so many companies are providing spaceflight… It’s not a (doing it) first thing for me.
We’re creating this industry.
It’s really going to change the way we look at not only the planet, but what we can achieve in our lifetimes.” At present, the about-90-minute commercial VG spaceflight, which will hopefully start next year, costs about $250,000.
Virgin Galactic hopes this will fall to about $40,000 over time.
Almost 600-700 tickets have been bought by future astro-tourists, a list that reportedly includes Tom Hanks, who starred in “Apollo 13”.