Sunita's  life journey is full of coincidences and second options. She never got to do what she wanted as the first choice, but second options opened new doors for her. She wanted to be a vet but ended up in the navy. There, her interest was in diving, but she became an aviator. In aviation, her first choice was to fly jet planes, but she was assigned helicopters. While doing all this, a career path in space was never on the cards. However, a visit to JSC (Johnson Space Centre) changed it all.

It so happened that while training to become a test pilot, Sunita had to attend a training session at JSC. The exposure was a part of the test pilot course. The class was taken by a veteran astronaut of NASA, John Young. He was among the handful of astronauts who landed and walked on the Moon in 1972 and had flown six times on the Shuttle. Before becoming an astronaut, Young was a naval officer and aviator and had been to the test pilot school. He mentioned that he had to learn to fly helicopters while training for the Moon landing. “He landed on the moon in some type of vertical apparatus—that sounds like helicopters, and I was a helicopter pilot—so it seemed like it might fit. Then, I started looking at what I needed to do to become an astronaut,” Sunita recalled later of her meeting with Young at JSC.