“You don’t look at the big problem all together, because I think it’s a little intimidating. You just take it one day at a time, meet the people who are going to meet with you…, and really try to do the best job that you can. That’s all teamwork, and that’s what space travel is about.”
Sunita Williams said this in a 2017 interview. Even in her full spacesuit gear complete with the helmet, there has always been something more between Ms. Williams and the rest of the world. There’s, of course, the recognition that she’s an icon. She’s undoubtedly an axis of soft diplomacy for NASA and the U.S., someone as associated with the pinnacle of human spaceflight as the admirable idea of (more) women in space.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Ms. Williams wanted to be a veterinarian before her older brother Jay suggested joining the Navy. She did, graduating in 1987, becoming a naval aviator in 1989 and commencing her service at a Helicopter Combat Support Squadron in Virginia. Among other activities, she flew support missions for Operations Desert Shield (the first phase of the Gulf War, in 1990-91) and Provide Comfort, and helped with relief operations from aboard the USS Sylvania in the wake of Hurricane Andrew.
Soon she was selected to study at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School (NTPS) and graduated in 1993, qualifying to put new or modified aircraft through their paces. This role opened the door for her to become a NASA astronaut five years later.
Ms. Williams’s first mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was STS-116, when NASA launched her and six other astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. While she was a member of the Expedition 15 crew, she participated in Expedition 14 to the ISS until Russia’s Fyodor Yurichkin took over from the U.S.’s Michael López-Alegría as crew commander in April 2007. Once her duties concluded, the Space Shuttle Atlantis — which NASA had launched on June 8, 2007 — brought her back on June 22.
Ms. Williams returned to the ISS in July 2012, this time onboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, along with Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko. She joined the Expedition 32 crew under the command of Gennady Padalka.
Triathlon onboard the ISS
Ms. Williams isn’t an icon for nothing. On April 16, 2007, she ran the Boston Marathon in space, completing 42 km on a treadmill onboard the ISS in 4 hours 24 minutes. Her younger sister Dina joined her on the earth. She went more than a step further in September 2012 when she completed a triathlon onboard the ISS (using specialised equipment onboard to approximate the swimming part of the event) in 1 hour 48.5 minutes. Importantly, on September 17, 2012, she also became only the second woman (after Peggy Whitson) to become the commander of the ISS, as part of Expedition 33.
Her next major assignment came in 2015, when NASA picked her to fly in the country’s first commercial spaceflights. She helped Boeing and SpaceX develop their crew capsules. On June 5, 2024, she became the first woman to test-fly an orbital spacecraft when NASA launched Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule. She was joined on this soon-to-be-infamous mission by astronaut Barry Wilmore.
Mr. Wilmore’s career trajectory has roughly parallelled Ms. Williams’s but with some important distinctions. After training with the Navy and then graduating from the NTPS, he flew missions for Operation Desert Shield as well as Desert Storm (the second phase of the Gulf War), including 21 combat missions, and then Operation Southern Watch. NASA picked him as a pilot in 2000. He launched onboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the ISS in November 2009 as part of Expedition 21 in a mission that lasted 11 days. His next major stint, as with Ms. Williams, was when he launched onboard a Soyuz rocket and spacecraft in September 2014 with Russia’s Yelena Serova and Aleksandr Samokutyayev as part of Expedition 41 on the ISS, taking over in November that year as the commander of Expedition 42, which lasted until March 2015.
He was also a bit of a trendsetter. For example, in his second stint, Mr. Wilmore required a ratchet wrench for a task but one wasn’t available onboard. So he requested and received instructions from the earth to use an onboard 3D printer to make the wrench; the crew thus became the first to manufacture an item off-world.
Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore both have something of an entrepreneurial spirit, guided by the “one step at a time” ethos and backed up by hard yards in the military and the rigours of being test pilots. They have both expressed excitement about working with NASA’s commercial partners and helping bring technologies created in the private sector to within the spaceflight fold.
Entrepreneurialism is characterised even more by responding on one’s feet to unforeseen, unforeseeable challenges — the kind one might encounter on Starliner’s first crewed flight, which was technically a previously unflown mission. The two have also weathered with grace the oft-misguided media coverage of the Starliner flight as well as the clumsy political overtones U.S. President Donald Trump attached to the mission to return them from the ISS earlier this month.
Support from India
Ms. Williams has also had to weather almost covetous expressions of support from India’s political leaders, including the Prime Minister himself, only because she is of Indian descent. She was born in Ohio in 1965 to Deepak Pandya, who’d left India seven years prior, and Slovene-American Ursuline Bonnie Pandya. But riding on the popular interest in her in the country, leaders cutting across ideological lines, including those in power in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, have singled her out for congratulation.
When Ministers Jitendra Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, and Piyush Goyal all called her “India’s daughter”, it was also a reminder that the same honorific has been withheld from the likes of Vinesh Phogat and Soni Sori, who have fought long and hard much closer home en route to their triumphs. Equally, Ms. Williams’s presence highlighted the absence of India’s own astronaut-designates — Shubanshu Shukla, Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Ajit Krishnan and Angad Pratap — from the limelight at an exceptional time in which so many people were interested in the lives and work of astronauts.
Ultimately, Sunita Williams is an icon because she has constantly reminded us of what matters for us to do and how we can get there: one step at a time.
Published – March 23, 2025 01:06 am IST
