Sunita Williams
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.
Sirisha Bandla
Sirisha Bandla was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, and raised partly in Houston, Texas. She studied aeronautical engineering at Purdue University and built a career in commercial spaceflight, eventually serving as Vice President of Government Affairs at Virgin Galactic. On July 11, 2021, she flew on Richard Branson’s inaugural crewed spaceflight aboard VSS Unity. This flight made her the third woman of Indian origin to reach space.