Learn English with Sunita Williams. In this inspiring 2018 conversation with students hosted by NCERT, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams shares how her unexpected journey—from helicopter pilot to space explorer—taught her the value of persistence, curiosity, and teamwork. She opens up about physical changes in space, overcoming failure, and discovering her true calling later in life.
Who This Speech Is For
Learners inspired by science, exploration, and space missions.
Students interested in women breaking barriers in STEM fields.
Intermediate learners wanting to improve listening through real conversational English.
Anyone who enjoys motivational stories about resilience and self-discovery.
How This Speech Helps Your English
Builds vocabulary around science, space, and the human body.
Improves comprehension of real spoken English with natural rhythm and tone.
Teaches how to express personal stories and life lessons clearly.
Shows how to describe cause and effect, growth, and reflection in storytelling.
Why This Speech Matters
Shares how curiosity and perseverance can shape an extraordinary career.
Encourages learners to stay flexible and open to unexpected opportunities.
Highlights the importance of teamwork, adaptability, and lifelong learning.
Reminds us that success often comes from following what we truly enjoy.
”Failure teaches success.
Transcript
Student: After becoming an astronaut, do you view the world from a different angle?
Sunita Williams: So was it my dream to become an astronaut first and foremost? No. When I was growing up, I’m so happy we didn’t say what year I was born in my introduction, but when I was growing up, I remember actually seeing the first men walk on the moon. And I thought to myself, now that would be cool. That’s what I want to do.
And it didn’t become a reality to become an astronaut like I mentioned earlier till later when I was a test pilot. And part of that reality came true because one of the gentlemen that was talking, his name was John Young, and he had actually been to the moon twice, once landed on it, the second time flew around it. But he mentioned about practicing in some type of vertical landing craft to be able to learn how to land on the moon. And I said, “Oh my gosh, I’m a helicopter pilot. I already have those skills.”
So this is really the first time it dawned on me that I could potentially do this same type of thing. And I tell you that because I didn’t think about it for a long time until later in life. So I just trekked through my life trying to find the things that I like to do. And I mentioned that earlier, and I would reemphasize that again.
If you’re interested in being an astronaut, astronauts, we need astronauts from all different fields because there’s so much we do up there. We’re the plumbers, the electricians, the IT guys, we’re the maintainers, we’re the toilet fixers, we’re the space walkers, we’re the scientists. And so we need people who have all of those skills to do that. So if you’re thinking about that, you’re on the right track.
And of course, yes, I absolutely view life on this Earth. I view being able to do whatever you want a lot differently. I was not a straight A student in college. I had a couple ups and downs in college. I had a couple failures as well as a lot of successes. And failure is good.
But what being an astronaut has reminded me is that you can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it. And have determination and find a path. So yes, for sure, I’ve had a different perspective about a lot of things.
Student: What was your motivation as a child or a student that inspired you to move on a path not often undertaken by women?
Sunita Williams: I think first of all I didn’t think about it that way. I just thought of it as something fun to do. And my path was not always as straight as it may seem. My biography maybe makes things look a little bit like they were straight from one thing to the next, but there were a lot of questions along the way.
So you guys are getting ready to think about what you’re going to do in the future, huh? Don’t feel locked into something is my one piece of advice. I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was growing up. I thought for sure I was going to be a veterinarian. My father is a doctor. Biology is a little bit in our family. But I also liked math and physics quite a bit.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do really. I just love animals, so I wanted to be a veterinarian. I didn’t get into my first choices of college, so I had to make a second choice about what I wanted to do. And the Naval Academy was recommended because my family was pretty athletic and we like camping is what my brother told me. I think you’ll like this school, because you like camping. I said, okay, sure.
And so that was not my first choice. When I was at the Naval Academy, I thought I wanted to be a diver because I was a swimmer. That seemed very comfortable. I didn’t get that first choice either. So I ended up going to be a pilot. When I was a pilot, I wanted to fly jets because Top Gun just came out. So I thought that was cool. And I became a helicopter pilot.
So the path was not quite straight. And it wasn’t even until later when I was in my mid-20s and I had gone to test pilot school, first time I had met an astronaut and knew what astronauts did that I thought, wow, I have some of the same things, same qualifications that these people have. So maybe this is a path that I can take.
So my point in all of that was my path was not predetermined, was not straight, but that’s OK. I think that’s normal for everybody. And one of the things that I would leave you with is find something that you like. It might take one or two or three tries to figure out what you like. But if you find something that you like, you’ll do it well. And that’s most important.
And I think all of the people who are astronauts, not all of them are test pilots. We have doctors. We actually have a veterinarian. We have engineers. We have scientists. But they’re all pretty good at what their fields are, because they really enjoy them. And then they apply to be astronauts.
So I would say I never thought about having a career that was maybe male dominated and that was maybe even more so in the military because they were my teammates and we worked together and I think that’s more important than singling out somebody for one thing or another. So thank you for your question.
Student: Ma’am, what are the major problems that you face when you come back to earth and how long does it take to regain all your physical abilities?
Sunita Williams: We have some what do you want to say mitigating methods up in space to make sure that people are coming back to Earth as normal as possible. There’s some things that we can’t really totally protect from. One of those things is some radiation.
You know, we are above the atmosphere, so we are getting an amount of radiation, which is a little bit more than folks get here on Earth. We have protective covering on the spacecraft, so we do as much as we can while we’re out there. We have protective covering on our spacesuits, so again, we do as much as we can. But you do get some radiation and you never can change that.
But the things that do change is your physiology changes, which is sort of fun, actually, to watch your body change. You know, things happen like the calluses on your feet start to go away because you don’t walk while you’re up there. My fingernails seem to grow a lot. My hair grew a lot while I was up there. So it’s sort of fun to watch all that happening.
Gravity is not taking a toll on you. I think some of the little wrinkles in your face go away for a couple reasons. One, because there’s a fluid shift, so the fluid comes up to your head. But that’s just sort of temporary.
Your spine also expands because of the vertebrae, the cartilage between the vertebrae is not having any pressure on it. So it makes you a little bit taller while you’re up in space. But that all, some of those things change when you come back home. As soon as you get, you can’t escape gravity. Once you’re here, you’re here.
So you shrink a little bit, your back hurts a little bit because you’re shrunk back. Unfortunately, some of the wrinkles come back, but that’s okay, that’s just life. But some of the things that we have to really worry about are bone density and muscle mass, right?
Because when you’re up in space, your bones start to leach away right away. You don’t need, you have this skeletal structure that we have, and so essentially, it’s advanced osteoporosis. It starts to kick in right away for everybody. And so to mitigate that, we run on the treadmill, which you’ve seen probably pictures of with the harness which holds you down.
We also do weightlifting, which really helps, particularly in the hip area and the feet area, because we do squat type of exercises with a bar on our back, as well as deadlifts, and that all helps to regenerate the bone density. And then also the cardiovascular with the running on the treadmill and the muscle mass and with the bicycle. So all of those things help when we get back.
So the long answer to your short question is, all of that new technology with all of those machines allowed all of most all of us now to come back in pretty good shape. So it takes the fluid shift maybe 24 hours or 48 hours or so to get back to normal so that you are your blood volume is back to normal so you can actually do more physical fitness physical exercises.
But my bone density, muscle mass were essentially the same. And we were able to test that about a week after getting home. And you could sort of you can see people are the same as when they left because we work out so rigorously while we’re up in space.
There’s also new diets that we’re trying while we’re up there because there’s definitely some things that are in the diet that will cause bone density issues. So we test ourselves right away the first moment we get back, about ten days after we get back, two weeks after we get back, a month, and then I’m going to have another test in about six months, but I should be pretty much back to normal within two weeks or so, generally back to normal.
Student: To astronauts whose consciousness during takeoff, since it’s against gravity and high speed makes you feel dizzy, did you feel someone has taken you by your shoulders?
Sunita Williams: Liftoff is a little bit, in a spacecraft, the way they have us seated and the way that the gravity force, the G, kicks in, is what we call a G factor, right? How much G, like right now we have one G of gravity pushing on us.
It’s a little bit different than in an airplane, that people think about loss of consciousness in an airplane. If somebody, what they call, pulls too many Gs, sometimes you have loss of consciousness. And the reason for that is the blood is draining from your head, and that will make you lose consciousness.
In a spacecraft, the way we are seated and the way that the G kicks in is, like I mentioned, it pushes down here on your chest. So it makes it a little bit harder to breathe because it’s pushing your lungs down, but it doesn’t pull the blood out of your head. So none of us lost consciousness on takeoff or even landing for that matter.
You can have an abnormal landing, we call it ballistic landing, which is a down mode from the normal type of landing. And in that case, the G level can get up about eight or nine. So that’s pretty extreme. And we’ve had a couple people who have had that experience.
It’s not a bad mode of the spacecraft, the Soyuz. It’s just a down-moding. It doesn’t, just not acting normally, but it’s not anything bad. It’s just, it’s how it’s designed. It’s aerodynamically designed to do that. And it’s fully survivable.
But in that case, that was a little bit excessive pressure. If you can imagine eight times gravity’s pushing down… It’s pretty huge, but it’s not for a long period of time. And we test this out so we all know what that feels like by riding in a centrifuge in Star City, outside of Moscow, where we do the training.
We’re in a centrifuge, and we go through the whole landing profile with that number of Gs so you can feel what it’s like. So no loss of conscious under normal launch or landing. A ballistic might have some impacts.
