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Now, the Needham native can add one more to her impressive resume: trailblazer.
The 58-year-old Williams is set to become the first woman aboard the maiden flight of a manned spacecraft when NASA and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner launches for the first time from Florida’s Cape Canaveral for the 24-hour journey to the International Space Station.
Originally scheduled for takeoff Monday night, May 6, the launch was scrapped “out of an abundance of caution for the safety of the flight and pad crew” after a last-minute problem with a valve on the spacecraft’s Atlas V rocket, United Launch Alliance said on X.
The next launch opportunity will be no earlier than Friday, May 10, according to NASA.
Williams, the second American astronaut of Indian heritage to go into space, will pilot Starliner alongside commander Butch Wilmore. The pair will serve as guinea pigs of sorts two years after Boeing flew the Starliner on an unmanned mission in May 2022.
The weeklong journey will mark its last test before the craft goes into regular service in 2025 as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, aimed at providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to the space station. SpaceX began providing service in 2020.
A 1983 graduate of Needham High School, Williams became an astronaut in August 1998 after more than a decade as a helicopter pilot in the US Navy. She made her first trip to the International Space Station aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in December 2006.
“I got to be part of the construction crew that actually built the space station,” she said in a May 2023 video interview with her alma mater, Florida Tech.
“And then after that I was the deputy chief of the office and then got to fly on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the fully completed space station and do a bunch of science experiments and spacewalks.”
Of her upcoming mission, Williams said she's spent the past eight years formulating the engineering process.
"How we're going to fly it, how we're going to operate it, how the next crews after us are actually going to use it for return to low earth orbit and back to the International Space Station," she told the school.
"This is a brand-new spacecraft and so we have to make sure everything's all squared away."
Throughout her career, Williams has logged more than 3,000 flight hours in 30 different aircraft. In 2019, her hometown of Needham honored her by naming its new elementary school Sunita L. Williams Elementary School.
Learn more about the upcoming Starliner mission on NASA's website.
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