Sunita blasted off to the orbiting space station last December and was meant to come home in end-June after a seven-month stay.
NEW YORK: There is both good news and bad news for astronaut Sunita Williams. The bad news first: she will be stuck in space longer than she planned because of a delay in shuttle flights to the international space station. The good news: the delay will allow Williams to break the US record for continuous time in space.
Sunita blasted off to the orbiting space station last December and was meant to come home in end-June after a seven-month stay. However, she has to catch a ride back to Earth on space shuttle Endeavour, which may reportedly get off the ground several weeks later than its originally scheduled June 28 launch.
Flight surgeon Dave Alexander was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that Williams’ physical fitness, mental well-being and radiation exposure would be monitored carefully, but "right now, the predictions are Suni can stay up for an extended period of time."
“We’re talking to her and doing things as best we can to make her happy and perhaps launch some special items that’ll make her more comfortable for that extended period of time,” Kirk Shireman, NASA's deputy manager of the space station program said at a press briefing.
Veteran NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will probably set the US record with 214 days in space when he returns to Earth on April 20 in a Russian Soyuz vehicle. But Williams is likely to shatter this record with her stay tipped to stretch beyond June.
Williams has already set the spacewalk mark for women. She broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria logged 28 hours and 17 minutes in four spacewalks in February.
But Williams who is the daughter of Indian doctor Deepak Pandya who migrated to the US in the 1960s and Ursaline, an American of Slavic descent is feels records are temporary milestones. “I believe there is a generation of explorers behind me who are going to shatter my record,” she earlier quipped.
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