Bandla, who was born in Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh and mentioned in Houston, Texas, will join Sir Richard Branson, the company's billionaire founder, and five others on board Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity to form a journey to the sting of space from New Mexico .
"I am so incredibly honoured to be a neighborhood of the amazing crew of #Unity22, and to be a neighborhood of a corporation whose mission is to form space available to all", she tweeted. Bandla are going to be astronaut no 004 and her flight role are going to be Researcher Experience, consistent with her profile on Virgin Galactic.
She will become the third Indian-origin woman to fly into space after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams.
"When I first heard that i used to be getting this chance , it had been just. i feel that that probably captured it alright , i used to be speechless. this is often a fantastic opportunity to urge people from different backgrounds, different geographies and different communities into space", she said during a video posted on Virgin Galactic Twitter on July 6
Bandla, a Purdue University alumna, are going to be evaluating the human-tended research experience, using an experiment from the University of Florida that needs several handheld fixation tubes which will be activated at various points within the flight profile, a press release on the Galactic website said.
Bandla started in her role because the vice president of state Affairs and Research Operations at Virgin Galactic in January 2021, the university said during a statement.
Bandla grew up in Houston, near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and always wanted to become an astronaut. But poor eyesight meant she couldn't meet the wants to become a pilot or an astronaut, derailing her high-school decide to go the Air Force-to-NASA route, she said within the statement.
"I’ve had fond memories of my time at Purdue”, Bandla said in 2021, “being a part of a gaggle of passionate individuals". Purdue built a robust foundation of technical and programmatic principles we all carried into our successful careers.
The flight window for subsequent rocket-powered test flight of its SpaceShipTwo Unity opens July 11, pending weather and technical checks, Galactic said during a statement.
The “Unity 22” mission are going to be the twenty-second flight test for VSS Unity and therefore the company’s fourth crewed spaceflight. it'll even be the primary to hold a full crew of two pilots and 4 mission specialists within the cabin, including the company’s founder, Sir Branson, who are going to be testing the private astronaut experience, it said.
"I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never hand over and to succeed in for the celebs . On July 11, it’s time to show that dream into a reality aboard subsequent @VirginGalatic spaceflight", Branson tweeted following the announcement on July 2.
Building on the success of the company’s most up-to-date spaceflight in May, Unity 22 will specialise in cabin and customer experience objectives.
