Indian Woman Engineer From Kalyan Helped Built Jeff Bezos' Space Rocket New Shepard

Despite having earned recognition in various fields, the society at large still believes that women can only handle household chores and children. People who think like this ought to meet Sanjal Gavande, an extraordinary woman who is part of the team that built the rocket system, New Shepard, for Bezos's space exploration company Blue Origin.

Who Is Sanjal Gavande?

Sanjal Gavande System Engineer at Blue Origin | Facebook/@Itsallaboutkalyan

30-year-old systems engineer Sanjal Gavande is a part of the team that built the Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos's rocket system New Shepard, which is scheduled to fly to the suborbital frontier on his company's New Shepard craft on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Sanjal Gavande hails from Kalyan, Maharashtra, on the outskirts of Mumbai, and she worked in marine and racing car companies before actualising her dream of helping build a spacecraft.

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Sanjal Gavande completed her mechanical engineering from Mumbai University in 2011 before leaving for the US to enrolled at Michigan Technological University for a masters in the subject. Sanjal cleared her masters with a first class in 2013 and then get a chance to work at Mercury Marine in Fon du Lac, Wisconsin.

Sanjal Gavande¡¯s dream

After working two years for the Wisconsin company, she quit joining Toyota Racing Development in Orange City, California. In the meantime, she continued taking flying lessons on weekends and on June 18, 2016, Gavande got a pilot's license. Although she had applied at NASA, she couldn't land a job due to citizenship issues. But, she did not lose her hope and applied at Blue Origin and she was selected as a system engineer at Blue Origin and eventually become a part of the team that built the New Shepard rocket.

Sanjal Gavande System Engineer at Blue Origin | TOI

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Her mother, Surekha, a retired MTNL employee, told TOI: ¡°From childhood, my daughter has been into space and we are proud that from making car engines she has graduated to rockets.¡± Sanjal¡¯s father, Ashok, is a retired Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation officer.

Sanjal Gavande's hard work paid off

While most girls did not opt for mechanical engineering because many believed that in this field a lot of fieldwork had that can¡¯t handle by girls. But Sanjal did the same opposite and opted for mechanical engineering to pursue her dreams.

Coming from a humble family, Sanjal Gavande has worked hard to achieve her dream and there's nothing that can stop her.

What is new Shepard the rocket system?

New Shepard developed by Blue Origin | Arstechnica

New Shephard has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard ¨C the first American to go to space ¨C 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.

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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.