Sanjal Gavande, a 30-year-old woman from Maharashtra’s Kalyan, is among the team of engineers who built Blue Origin’s suborbital space rocket New Shephard that will take billionaire Jeff Bezos and three others to space later this month.
A systems engineer at the commercial spaceflight company, Sanjal Gavande is a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Mumbai. She went to the US in 2011 to pursue her master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technological University. “I am really happy that my childhood dream is about to come true. I am proud to be a part of Team Blue Origin,” Gavande told The Times of India.
Sanjal Gavande, the daughter of a municipal corporation employee and a retired MTNL official, opted for aerospace as a subject in her master’s and cleared it with a first-class.
“She always wanted to build a spaceship and that is the reason she chose aerospace as a subject while pursuing her master’s degree at Michigan Technological University,” her father Ashok Gavande, who lives in lives in Kalyan’s Kolsewadi area, told India Today.
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Sanjal Gavande worked with Mercury Marine, the marine engine division of Brunswick Corporation, after finishing her masters at Wisconsin. After working at Mercury Marine for three years first as a design analysis intern and then as a design analysis engineer, she joined Toyota Racing Development as a mechanical design engineer.
Sanjal Gavande, who holds a commercial pilot’s license, applied for a space engineering job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) but was not selected over citizenship issues.
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“People told us that she is a girl, so why has she opted for mechanical engineering? I also thought sometimes about whether she would be able to handle such hard work. She has now made us all proud. She had a dream of design aerospace rockets and she has achieved it,” Surekha, her mother, told India Today.
“We just supported her and she achieved everything on her own,” her father said.
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She has been working with Blue Origin in Seattle as a systems engineer since April this year. She was also a part-time public relations chair and chairman of the board of The Ninety-Nines, a non-profit educational organisation.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will blast off from West Texas atop a New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute flight along with his brother Mark, 82-year-old trailblazing aviator Wally Funk and a Dutch teenager. According to Reuters, New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. Bezos will become the second person to ride his own rocket into space, after Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson by nine days.
