Meet Suni Williams, Pilot of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test

NASA astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams is the pilot of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test mission. She is a veteran of two missions: Expedition 14/15 in 2006 through 2007, and Expedition 32/33 in 2012. The Needham, Massachusetts, native conducted seven spacewalks over the course of her career, totaling 50 hours and 40 minutes. Before her career began as a NASA astronaut in 1998, Williams graduated with her bachelor’s degree in Physical Science from the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, before obtaining her master’s degree in Engineering Management from the Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne. In total, she has logged more than 3,000 flight hours in over 30 different aircraft.

What is said in the film

Exploration is curiosity. It's asking the question why, it's taking that next step. Every time we do something for the first time, we're expanding our knowledge. My name is suni williams, and I'm the pilot for nasa's boeing crew flight test mission to the international space station. I feel really lucky to have grown up in a small town outside of boston, needham, massachusetts.

It was a great town because we were able to ride our bikes everywhere we went. My brother, sister and I, we were all swimmers and it was just a great childhood. My dad was a doctor and also did neuroscience research. We were the strange family who had pictures and diagrams of brains on our dining room table. My older brother went to the naval academy.

I started researching a little bit and I thought, well, what the heck, I'll try this out. And when I went, I found that I really loved it. Teamwork. Followership. Leadership.

Those opportunities that we had right from the very beginning, and to accomplish something a little bit bigger than yourself. And I think that paved the way for the rest of my career. Got a basic engineering degree from the naval academy. I really didn't know what it was all about when I went through that course curriculum. But when I went to test pilot school, all of that stuff sort of gelled together.

I was like, oh, wow, this is why we do math modeling. This is how we try to predict how change in an engine is going to affect the way the helicopter flies. Time on the international space station is priceless. People always ask, you know, do you get bored or, you know, it's a terrible being up there for a long period of time. And for me, I loved every minute.

There was always something to do. You wake up, you look at your timeline like, wow, I got to do this experiment today, I got to get ready for a spacewalk. Every day was different, and just life on the space station becomes routine, which is sort of crazy to think about it. At one point in time, on my first mission, I was like, I don't even remember really what it's like to walk. I've been flying around for so long, I don't even know what it's like to sit down.

I got assigned to the commercial crew cadre in 2015. We went to the companies, found out the shell of their programs, and then actually started working with them to make them what they are today to accommodate astronauts. For starliner, we've been heavily involved in the last couple of years in the software, with the folks doing the development to make sure its capability will allow us to come home, and we've been involved with all the suit development, making sure every different size of person could fit in all these suits, and they can operate the spacecraft adequately. We've had our fingers on every single procedure that we work inside the cockpit, as well as operated it with our mission control team to make sure that everything that future crews will do will be right. We haven't had the classic training as we had for shuttle and soyuz.

We've sort of helped develop the training as well as the hardware, and this is sort of the shape of things to come as we get ready to go back to the moon. All of that is going to be developmental, and we're going to have to have the same mindset. It's not already established. We all have to be part of this big team to help develop it and make sure that integration, you know, as the astronauts use all this equipment, it's going to be top notch and ready to take us even further.

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