Sunita Williams retires from NASA, currently on India tour

Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams has retired from NASA, the space agency announced the news on Tuesday (January 20), saying her retirement took effect at the end of December.

Williams’ crewmate on Boeing’s ill-fated capsule test flight, Butch Wilmore, left NASA last summer. The duo made news repeatedly for being stuck for months at the International Space Station in 2024-25.

The pair was launched to the space station in 2024, the first people to fly Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule. Their mission should have lasted just a week, but stretched to more than nine months because of Starliner trouble. In the end, they caught a ride home last March with SpaceX.

A trailblazer

Williams, 60, a former Navy captain, spent more than 27 years at NASA, logging 608 days in space over three station missions. She also set a record for the most spacewalking time by a woman: 62 hours during nine excursions.

NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman called her “a trailblazer in human spaceflight.” “Congratulations on your well-deserved retirement,” he said in a statement.

Boeing’s next Starliner mission will carry cargo—not people—to the space station. NASA wants to make sure all of the capsule’s thruster and other issues are solved before putting anyone on board. The trial run will take place later this year.

Williams is currently in India. On Tuesday, she took part in an interactive session, “Eyes on the Stars, Feet on the Ground”, held at the American Center in Delhi.

Meeting Kalpana Chawla’s mother

After the session, she met the late Kalpana Chawla’s 90-year-old mother with a warm hug.

India-born American astronaut Chawla was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003.

She was the first woman of Indian origin to go to space and her death was deeply grieved in India as well.

Williams, wearing a trademark deep blue space overalls and sporting a pair of space-themed canvas shoes, stepped off the dais and reached out to Chawla’s mother, Sanyogita Chawla, who was sitting in the front row inside the auditorium.

She also met Kalpana’s sister, Deepa, who accompanied her mother at the event.

Williams to attend KLF

Williams is set to participate in the ninth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) starting January 22, organisers had announced late December.

Williams was born to a Gujarati father, Deepak Pandya, hailing from Jhulasan in Mehsana district, and a Slovenian mother, Ursuline Bonnie Pandya, on September 19, 1965, in Euclid, Ohio, in the US.

In her brief opening remarks, she also said that coming back to India felt akin to a homecoming, as it is the country where her father was born.

‘A family member’

Kalpana Chawla’s told news agency PTI that Williams “is like a family member”.

After the Columbia disaster, “she used to come to our home for three months”, staying from morning till night, regularly, and offering comfort to “our family in grief”, the 90-year-old said.

Williams and Chawla used to encourage each other as astronauts to grow further in their shared profession, she reminisced.

“She (Kalpana) used to say, ‘Humanity is the only religion’, and she never took any other name. When we used to ask her, what is your religion? She would say, ‘My religion is work’,” a proud mother recalled.

(With agency inputs)