Sunita Williams was born in Ohio to a Gujarati immigrant father and a Slovenian mother. She graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and worked as a test pilot before NASA selected her in 1998. During her 2006 International Space Station mission, she set a record for the most spacewalk time by a woman. In 2024, she returned to the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner for an extended nine-month mission, and returned in 2025.
