Report by OD Bureau, Bhubaneswar: ‘Space Woman’ Dr. Susmita Mohanty gets featured in BBC’s annual list of 100 most influential women around the globe for the year 2019.
In this prestigious annual list of BBC, women from various other grounds who have influenced societal changes, have been honoured..
Susmita has founded the first space start-up of India ‘Earth2Orbit’ in 2008. It focuses on facilitating American and Japanese launches on the PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket from 2008-2016. Since 2017, has been supporting global climate action by using earth observation data analytics to make cities and agriculture climate-smart. She is the only space entrepreneur in the world to have started companies on 3 different continents.
Susmita is the daughter of Nilamani Mohanty, the former ISRO scientist from Odisha. She holds multiple degrees from India’s National Institute of Design, France’s International Space University (ISU), and PhD on aerospace architecture from Sweden. She has also worked at Boeing and NASA and has consulted with European Space Agency (ESA) and even ISRO, among other space organizations. Mohanty, with NASA on Shuttle-Mir missions, Boing on the International Space Station (ISS) programme, collaborated with government and non-government space entities in Europe, the US and Japan, helped pioneer a new genre of space architecture called Trans-Gravity and launched three companies—MoonFront (2001), an aerospace consulting firm in San Francisco, Liquefier Systems Group (2003), an aerospace architecture and design firm in Vienna, and Earth2Orbit (2008), India’s first private space start-up in Bengaluru.
She is also a member of the International Academy of Aeronautics and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She was honoured on Capitol Hill with the International Achievement Award for promoting international cooperation through her orbital enterprise in the year 2005.
In 2017, Fortune Magazine had featured her in the cover. She was voted into Financial Times’ list of “25 Indians to Watch”.
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