Sirisha Bandla: India celebrates woman who flew on Virgin Galactic

Sir Richard Branson celebrates with Sirisha Bandla perched on his shoulder. (IMAGE COPYRIGHT GETTY IMAGES)

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

Ms 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.

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".

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.

Bandla, who developed an early interest in space, works as the vice president of government affairs for Virgin Galactic.

Her grandfather told Reuters that "from the beginning, she was fascinated towards the sky, looking at the sky, space, how to enter space and what is there".

Publish : 2021-07-12 14:44:00

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