"I am so excited. I can't really wait to go," Sunita Williams told Suman Guha Mozumder in a brief telephone interview from Star City last week before being quarantined for the flight preparation
Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams nee Pandya, who set a record for longest time spent in space by a woman -- during her first space journey in 2006 to the International Space Station aboard STS-116 -- is set to revisit the ISS for the second time in six years.
Williams, who will launch July 14 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has been training in Star City, home of Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, near Russia for the past several months. Another feather to her cap came when she was named commander of the space station after the existing crew comes back two months after she and her fellow astronauts reach the ISS for expedition 32-33.
Williams, who would launch on the Soyuz TMA-31S along with JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Aki Hoshide and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, will dock with the ISS July 17 at 8.50 am Moscow time and join the current crew of Expedition 31, Joe Acaba, Gennady Padalka, and Sergei Valkov.
"I am so excited. I can't really wait to go," Williams told Rediff.com's Suman Guha Mozumder in a brief telephone interview from Star City last week before being quarantined for the flight preparation.
Williams, who holds three records for female space travellers -- longest spaceflight (195 days); four spacewalks; and 29 hours and 17 minutes of total time spent on spacewalks -- said she plans to return to Earth in November 2012, tentatively a week after the American presidential election.
Hello Suni, great to hear you are going to space once again. So how is your pre-flight preparations going on over there? You can hear me, right?
Thanks. Yeah, we've got you loud and clear. We're doing great. We've finished up all our exams here at Star City and everybody's taking a little bit of a break with their families before we get ready to go down to Baikonur.
You are going to the ISS for the second time in six years. Do you have the same level of excitement and the 'overwhelming feeling' you told me you had the last time on the eve of your departure for ISS?
Absolutely. It's been a little while for me -- it's been, like you said, six years since I went up on the space station last time. I actually can't wait to go. It's just a couple of weeks away, and it feels again like it's almost unbelievab#8804 like it's not going to happen. You know, this time I'm going to fly in a brand new spacecraft. So it's almost like doing the whole thing all over again. I'm really excited to go this time.
