Sanjal Gavande, a 30-year-old woman 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.
Born in Kalyan, Maharashtra, Gavande is a systems engineer at Blue Origin who always dreamt of designing aerospace rockets.
After completing Bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Mumbai, she flew to the US in 2011 to pursue Master’s in mechanical engineering from the Michigan Technological University.
She also applied for an engineering job at the US space agency NASA, but finally landed her dream job at Blue Origin.
Daughter of municipal corporation employee and retired MTNL official
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.
Speaking to India Today, Sanjal Gavande’s parents said that their daughter achieved what she aimed for. Her father, Ashok Gavande said, “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. She worked with Mercury Marine after finishing her Masters at Wisconsin. Then she went to work with Toyota racing development at Orange City in California.”
“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.
A ‘silent child’, Gavande always wanted to build rockets
Sanjal Gavande’s mother Surekha said, “She was a silent girl since childhood and good in studies. She was also good in drawing and won many accolades, which helped her in mechanical design when she chose mechanical engineering.”
“People told us that she is a girl and 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,” she added.
What is new Shepard the rocket system?
New Shephard has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard – the first American to go to space – and offers flights to space over 100 km above the Earth and accommodation for payloads. New Shepard rocket is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft.
The system is a fully reusable, vertical takeoff and vertical landing space vehicle that accelerates for about 2.5 minutes before the engine cuts off. After separating from the booster, the capsule free falls in space, while the booster performs an autonomously controlled vertical landing back to Earth.
