Sunita Williams

Washington, Dec. 4: When Sunita Pandya Williams heads out to space on Thursday aboard the US shuttle Discovery, her physician father’s country of birth, India, will very much be on her mind.

Sunita, 41, said in a pre-flight interview conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa): “I am half-Indian and I have got, I am sure, a group of Indian people who are looking forward to seeing this second person of Indian origin flying up in space.”

Her father, Deepak Pandya, migrated to Ohio, where Sunita was born in a small town of Euclid.

Sunita will be the second American of Indian ethnicity — the first was Kalpana Chawla — that Nasa will put into space.

Sunita said her satisfaction with going out as an astronaut this week comes, partly, from getting people in far-away India interested in outer space. “It is nice to know that everybody (on Discovery) brings along with them a group of people from all over the world that get interested in space.”

The reference is to herself, an Indian-American, a Swede, a British-born American, two African-Americans and an Alaskan, who will be among the Discovery crew.

Sunita will not return to Earth immediately along with the rest of the Discovery crew when they complete their mission in 12 days. Instead, she will spend half a year aboard Expedition 14, an international space station, replacing German astronaut Thomas Reiter.

On the space station, she will have Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and an American for company.

Sunita’s father went to school in Junasan village in north Gujarat and later in Ahmedabad. He completed his medical studies in Surat and worked for a while at the V.S. Hospital there. Pandya left for the US in 1960 for further study in neurology. There he met his future wife and mother to Sunita, Ursaline, who came from Yugoslavia.

Pandya is closely related to the late Haren Pandya, Gujarat’s home minister, who was murdered three years ago. According to the extended Pandya family, the first visit by Sunita to Gujarat was for the thread ceremony of Haren Pandya. She visited India after the death of Kalpana Chawla in the Columbia spacecraft tragedy as part of an effort by the Chawla family and others to keep alive the memory of the first Indian-American astronaut.

According to the extended family, Sunita is fond of samosas and the Gujarati delicacy dhokla, which her mother has learned to prepare. She will get none of it in outer space, although, her menu for the Discovery flight, released by Nasa, includes some Chinese dishes.

She is married to Michael Williams, a former naval officer who now works for law enforcement.