Sirisha Bandla’s earliest childhood memories involve lying on the roof of her family’s home in India and staring at the night sky.

“In India, your power would come in for hours at a time and then shut off. And when it shut off at night, the sky was just brilliant,” Bandla said. “There’s so many stars, and it’s hot there, so sometimes you sleep outside on the roof. Those are some of the memories I have, of me looking up and falling asleep under millions of stars. I think that slowly started my fascination with space.”

In time, she decided that she wanted to become an engineer and astronaut, too. And she applied to only one university, Purdue, because of her single-minded desire to reach that goal. Although not by the traditional path that most of the 25 previous Boilermaker astronauts had followed.

In July 2021, at just 34 years old, Bandla was one of four mission specialists on Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 suborbital flight, which reached 53.5 miles above Earth. During a 90-minute mission on that July morning, the little girl who used to stare up at the stars was now among them.

As Virgin Galactic’s vice president of government affairs and research operations, Bandla provided an especially meaningful presence on the first fully crewed spaceflight by a private commercial company. Her mission is to help the company create opportunities for anyone to travel into space, and it did that very thing for her since poor eyesight prevented her from pursuing a coveted position as a NASA astronaut.