United States Navy captain. NASA astronaut. Veteran of three space missions, including the troubled 2024–25 Boeing Starliner test flight that left her and Barry Wilmore on the International Space Station for nine months when the spacecraft was found unsafe to return them on. She has logged more than three hundred days in space across her career and, until 2017, held the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Daughter of Deepak Pandya, a Gujarati neuroanatomist who emigrated to Boston in the 1950s, and Ursuline Bonnie Pandya. United States Naval Academy 1987, then military helicopter pilot, then NASA selection in 1998. Indian by lineage, American by passport, a sea-and-sky person by formation. The diaspora's space career, the working version of it, in one biography.