 So which one's your favorite? Oh my goodness! Oh, I'm so excited. I can't wait to meet my industry hero. Suresh is one of the main reasons I came here to Purdue. So being able to see her in person in the flesh, it's gonna be pretty insane. I can't wait. So Suresh is among the few Indian origin astronauts that I've been to space. And she's someone I've always looked up to being an Indian woman myself. So which one's your favorite? Oh my goodness! Hello! Hi! Oh my goodness! It's an absolute honor to be standing in front of you in person today. I was like my shoes are really squeaky going on here so I'm glad I snuck up on you. I love this. Thank you so much. It's something that I've been wearing in pursuit of my dream to becoming an astronaut. And here you are, right here, an astronaut in front of my eyes. That's insane. Oh my god. I love that it says Mars astronaut. Yeah, thank you so much. That was something I definitely wanted on my flight suit. That's not something you see on other astronauts' flight suits. Because my goal is Mars, I want it to be very clear. Mars or not. Mars, I love it. I'm sure, just like myself, growing up we didn't have a whole lot of role models that resembled us. And for me, the main person really was Kalpanachala. And she was before my time, essentially. She had tragically passed away. Being able to see an Indian woman like yourself, shattered this glass ceiling, essentially you were doing it in real time for me. I watched the launch with my little sister, who was at the time just 12 years old. And I remember my sister said in that moment, you know, what's that Aka's name, which in total is older sister. You are making it happen in real time. So what does it feel like? How does it feel like for you to be the person that is doing it, that is shattering these glass ceilings actively, being this representation for girls like yourself? The beautiful thing is it feels like myself. For once I can really just be myself and be accepted. And the fact that it's had this incredible impact, it makes me feel very amazing. And as you said, I actually looked up to Dr. Chowla growing up. I've never met her, but saw her go to space and, you know, just seeing her do the things that I wanted to do, just reduce kind of a mental barrier that I had put up for myself. Just seeing someone that you shared an identity with, a culture with really allows you to put yourself in a headspace that you can achieve almost anything you put your mind to. What would you say are some of the biggest takeaways from Purdue as a student? The education I got at Purdue, it was aerospace engineering, has actually been incredibly helpful in business development and policy because I'm able to understand technical concepts and communicate it out to a population that has not studied in great detail these concepts. Absolutely, yeah. And that's another reason why I never took writing and communication classes here at Purdue for granted because I knew that they would serve me well. I feel like this is a very cliched question to ask an astronaut, but I've just always wanted to ask it. What was it like? I knew you were going to ask that and I still don't have an answer. I have said this, actually I've said this multiple times and I'm just going to repeat it, sorry. I cannot think of a word besides incredible to describe the experience and I literally googled synonyms for incredible and looked through the list and I was like, nah, none of these really encapsulate how it was to go to space and it's because it's more than just the feeling of going to space. It's an experience and it's a complete journey that honestly started way before we took off and lasted much longer after we landed and all of that just it's the view, it's floating in weightlessness, it's the journey of getting to know your crew and sharing it with your crew. All of that really encapsulated going to space and I honestly, I really can't think of any other way to describe it with words and I am so, so excited to send up artists and professional communicators and poets in the future because I know they're going to come back and be able to share this experience in a much better way than I can with my word of incredible but it makes me excited for the future but it just makes me want to send more people up to space so that they can come back and just share that feeling because it really is a feeling, it's not something that can be easily communicated. You can communicate with words. Yeah. Wow. And I grew up probably like you looking at pictures of Earth from space. Did you do a somersault? Yes, I did. There is a video of me in space doing a somersault and we, the crew were selected to test out the cabin for our future astronauts so we actually, if you look down at our rest, we had almost every 10 seconds planned and there is one like 10 second period where we were like, Sarisha, do a somersault on my test card. What was it like to finally achieve that childhood goal? It was a world, honestly I didn't really sit down, nothing really processed until months afterward where it really was like, hey, I did it, what's next? And it was kind of a really exciting feeling because for the last 33 years of my life, I had been working towards going to space and now I have a clean slate to think about what my next goal is and I've always been a goal oriented person. I'm not one that thrives without some sort of direction, it's just me. I've accepted it. So it was kind of a, hey, I did it and kind of very excited and anxious about what's next. Right after I landed though, the first thing I did was I saw my dad and my mom. So first thing I did, my dad gave me the biggest hug. I had sunglasses around my neck, the sunglasses shattered because he gave me such a hard hug and my dad's like, oh, no, I'm so sorry. And I was like, don't worry about it. And then two weeks later, he came to visit me in DC and he had glued back together my sunglasses that have gone to space and he's wearing them around, like doing yard work. What does your two infinity and beyond look like? What is your future? Honestly, I have no idea. I am still figuring that out. I think I got to space faster than I had anticipated, which is not a bad thing. But I'm in this kind of space where I'm taking some time to figure out what the next thing is. But in the meantime, I'm just in a position where I can just keep sending up the people to space, which is the dream.