30-year-old Sanjal Gavande from Maharashtra is part of the team of engineers that built Blue Origin’s suborbital space rocket New Shephard, which will carry Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three others to space on July 20.
A systems engineer at the spaceflight services company, she was born in Kalyan and dreamed of building a spaceship even as a child.
Sanjal Gavande is the daughter of Ashok Gavande, a retired employee of the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation, and Surekha, a retired MTNL employee
Gavande had applied for the position of space engineer at NASA but was rejected citing citizenship issues. However, she later joined Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin as a systems engineer at the beginning of April this year.
Sanjal Gavande is a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Mumbai. She shifted to the US in 2011 to pursue her master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technological University. Before joining Blue Origin, Gavande worked with Mercury Marin for three years after her master’s degree and then joined Toyota Racing Development as a mechanical design engineer.
Jeff Bezos is set to fly off to space in the first crewed launch by Blue Origin. New Shephard’s launch will take place on July 20 at 8:00 am Central Time (1300 GMT). The blast will take place from a remote facility in the west Texas desert called Launch Site One, some 25 miles (40 kilometres) north of the nearest town, Van Horn.
