• Aeronautical engineer Sirisha Bandla became the third Indian-American woman to fly into space when she joined British billionaire Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic’s first fully-crewed successful suborbital test flight from the US state of New Mexico on July 11.

• Bandla was born in Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh and brought up in Houston.

• Her flight role was Researcher Experience. The other crew members were two pilots and three other crewmates, including billionaire Branson.

• She became the third Indian-origin woman to fly into space after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. Rakesh Sharma is the only Indian citizen to travel in space. The former Indian Air Force pilot flew aboard Soyuz T-11 on April 3, 1984, part of the Soviet Interkosmos programme.

• Bandla moved to the US when she was 4-year-old and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University in 2011. She finished her Master of Business Administration degree from George Washington University in 2015.

Virgin’s Unity 22 mission

• Virgin Galactic is a vertically integrated aerospace and space travel company, pioneering human spaceflight for private individuals and researchers, as well as a manufacturer of advanced air and space vehicles.

• Virgin Galactic — the business Branson started in 2004 — aims to fly private citizens to the edge of space. The trips are designed to permit passengers to experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and observe the curvature of Earth.

• Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, as the space plane is called, took off for the 1.5-hour mission above New Mexico from the Spaceport America launch facility.

• Bandla joined Branson and four others on board Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity to make a journey to the edge of space from New Mexico. 

• They reached an altitude of about 88 kilometers over the New Mexico desert, enough to see the curvature of the Earth. 

• The crew experienced a few minutes of weightlessness before making a gliding descent back to Earth.

• The primary objective for Unity 22 was to serve as a test flight for future commercial passenger flights by Virgin Galactic.

• The gleaming white space plane was borne with a twin-fuselage carrier jet VMS Eve (named after Branson’s mother).

• The four mission specialists evaluated different experiences that Virgin Galactic has promised its future customers, many of whom have already reserved trips to space with the company at $250,000 a seat.

• Bandla tested the experience of performing experiments aboard Unity during different phases of the flight, including the weightless period.

• This was the 22nd flight of Unity, but only its fourth launch to space.

• VSS Unity is the company’s second SpaceShipTwo after the first, VSS Enterprise, broke apart during a 2014 test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.

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