For example, the resume does not mention that Suni dared to swim a 12-mile stretch of water from the Boston Lighthouse to the Boston Aquarium when she was just 11. Bonnie Pandya recalls how once, on a bright spring day, Suni, then a high school student, got excited by the beautiful weather and said she wanted to take part in the famous Boston Marathon, which was to start in a few hours. "I told her we were not prepared and that she hadn't done this before," says her mother, "but she said she wanted to try. So, we drove off to the staring point just as the gun was going off."

Suni just got into the crowd. Her mom told her to call from a public telephone booth if she couldn't make it to the finish line, so she could pick her up. She gave her 10 cents to make the call and asked her to put the coin in her tennis shoe. After a while, apparently, Suni found it difficult to run with the shoes and took them off. "She made it without shoes, running the full 26 miles, half of the stretch barefoot," her mother says. Such grit has always been the staple of Suni's character.

In her early 20s, she applied to test pilot school, and spoke of her ambition to become an astronaut to her commanding officer, who was in charge of her evaluation. Suni recalls that he laughed the minute he heard about it because she was a helicopter pilot. The officer told her point blank that she was never going to be an astronaut, and that the very thought was crazy. "I then applied to test pilot school, which is where a lot of pilot astronauts come from. While we were at the school, we came down to Johnson Space Centre for a tour. There, someone who went to the moon on the Apollo program twice was telling us about his adventures. A little voice in my brain kept telling me that the only person telling me I couldn't be an astronaut was me. If I wanted to do it, I just had to figure it out. So, I filled out the application and proceeded to get my masters degree," Suni recalled in an interview.

This tendency to challenge herself, whether in terms of becoming a jet pilot, swimming in cold water, taking part barefoot in a marathon or even mastering Shakespeare as part of her advanced literature course in high school, has cropped up in almost everything Suni has done in her life.

Image: Bonnie and Deepak Pandya with their children - Sunita, Jay and Dina.

Photograph: Courtesy the Pandya family

Also see: Williams: Ready to conquer space

Back

|

Next