NASA picks Sunita Williams to fly 1st Commercial flights

Indian-origin Sunita Williams is among four “veteran” astronauts picked by NASA to fly the first commercial space vehicles, a part of the space agency’s ambitious plan to put a man on Mars by 2030.

Williams, 49, accompanied by Robert Behnken, Eric Boe and Douglas Hurley, will train and prepare for commercial spaceflights that will return American launches to the US soil and further open up low-Earth orbit transportation to the private sector.

“These distinguished, veteran astronauts are blazing a new trail - that will one day land them in the history books and Americans on the surface of Mars,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

The four astronauts will work closely with the Boeing Company and SpaceX to develop their crew transportation systems and provide crew transportation services to and from the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said.

“We are on a journey to Mars, and in order to meet our goals for sending American astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s we need to be able to focus both on deep space and the groundbreaking work being done on the ISS,” Bolden said.