NRIs celebrates: NRI Sirisha Bandla woman
who flew with Richard Branson into space

Los Angeles, July 13, 2021
NRIpress.club/Ramesh/ A.Gary Singh

NRIs and Indians in India are celebrating Sirisha Bandla's flight to the edge of space on billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic rocket plane.

Sirisha Bandla is the second woman, born in India to go to space after Kalpana Chawla who died when the Columbia Space Shuttle crashed at re-entry in 2003. All seven astronauts on that shuttle were killed when they tried to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.

The rocket flew high above New Mexico in the US before returning to Earth just an hour after leaving the ground.

Sir Richard called the trip the "experience of a lifetime".

• Last Sunday's trip makes the UK entrepreneur the first of the new space tourism pioneers to try out their own vehicles, beating Amazon's Jeff Bezos and SpaceX's Elon Musk.

According to the Reuters:

• Her grandfather said that "from the beginning, she was fascinated towards the sky, looking at the sky, space, how to enter space and what is there".
• Earlier this month, Ms Bandla had tweeted that she would be part of the five-member crew on board the rocket.
  Sirisha Bandla, who developed an early interest in space, works as the vice president of government affairs for Virgin Galactic.
• She was born in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh
• Sirisha Bandla is a 34-year-old aeronautical engineer who, as part of Branson's team, made it possible to jet into space. Bandla herself described her experience , just as her grandfather has done above, and here are her exact words: "I have been dreaming of going to space since I was young and literally it is a dream come true."
  

Indian women are not just breaking glass ceilings—they’re literally dismantling ALL ceilings on this planet and rocketing into space. Keep flying high @SirishaBandla. You went from Guntur to Zero-Gravity, said Anand Mahindra