NASA – Sunita Willams, the Indian-American astronaut who took off for her second trip to outer space on Sunday will vote for the U.S. presidential polls from the International Space Station, which will be held in the month of November.
Sunita Williams along with Russian Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency flight engineer Akihiko Hoshide took off their space journey on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodromein Kazakhstan, on Sunday. Williams will be returning on Nov 12, a week after the U.S. elections.
Williams will be voting with the help of a special programme set by the NASA, known as ‘Voting from Space’. “Well, there’s a programme called Voting from Space, we’re working through it right now. I’m actually a Florida voter, so we had to have a little bit more work involved–Texas has already, worked through the process–and I will actually be voting from space,” Williams said before her flight.
Williams, who is a sports lover is also enthusiastic about watching the London Olympics from space and is planning to conduct relay race from there. “I’m looking at some type of relay maybe or something like that. So I think we’re going to have some competitions up there. We’ll see what happens,” she said. During her Naval Academy days, Sunita was a part of several sporting events, especially swimming.
“I was on the swim team there, I was on the cross country team, on the bike club, so a lot about sports ….. I went to jump school and stuff like that, just a lot of good outdoorsy stuff,” Williams said in a pre-flight interview to NASA.
According to Williams, the goal of the International Space Station and the spirit of Olympics have something in common.”Well, of course. It’s, I mean, the Olympics, what is it, it’s an international competition, to foster friendship and, and competition across, across the planet, and I think that’s exactly what the International Space Station is.”
