India is amazing from space, says NASA astronaut Sunita Williams

Sunita Williams said and voiced optimism that she will visit her “father's home country” and share experiences about space exploration with people there

New York: India is amazing from space, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams said and voiced optimism that she will visit her “father’s home country” and share experiences about space exploration with people there.

Sunita made these remarks during a press conference Monday. She was responding to a question on how India looked from space when she was in the International Space Station and on possibility of her collaborating with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on space exploration.

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“India is amazing. Every time we went over the Himalayas, and I’ll tell you, Butch got some incredible pictures of the Himalayas. Just amazing,” Sunita said.

The 59-year-old NASA astronaut and fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore addressed reporters at their first joint press conference days after they returned to Earth as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, having been stranded in space for over nine months.

“And you can see, like I’ve described it before, just like this ripple that happened, obviously when the plates collided, and then as it flows down into India. It’s many, many colours,” she said.

“I think, when you come from the east, going into like Gujarat and Mumbai, the fishing fleet that’s off the coast there gives you a little bit of a beacon that here we come, and then all throughout India, I think the impression I had was it was just like this network of lights from the bigger cities going down through the smaller cities. Just incredible to look at at night as well as during the day, highlighted, of course, by the Himalayas, which is just incredible as a forefront going down into India,” she said.

Sunita added that “I hope, and I think for sure, I’m gonna be going back to my father’s home country and visiting with people and getting excited about the first, or not the first, but the Indian national who’s going up on the Axiom Mission coming up, pretty awesome,” she said.

She made those remarks while referring to the Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) commercial astronaut mission to the International Space Station that will include Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India.

Lucknow-born Shukla will be India’s second astronaut after former Indian Air Force officer Rakesh Sharma to go to space since 1984.

“They’ll have a hometown hero there of their own that will be able to talk about how wonderful the International Space Station is from his perspective. But I hope I can meet up at some point in time, and we can share our experiences with as many people in India as possible, because it’s a great country, another wonderful democracy that’s trying to put its foot in the space countries, and we’d love to be part of that and help them along,” she said.

Sunita’s father Deepak Pandya hailed from Gujarat and came to the US in 1958 where he did his internship and residency training in Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. She was born in Ohio to Deepak and Ursuline Bonnie Pandya.