{"id":11971,"date":"2006-12-11T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-11T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2006\/12\/11\/space-shuttle-astronaut-sunita-blasts-off-with-ganesha-gita-and-samosas\/"},"modified":"2006-12-11T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-11T12:00:00","slug":"space-shuttle-astronaut-sunita-blasts-off-with-ganesha-gita-and-samosas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2006\/12\/11\/space-shuttle-astronaut-sunita-blasts-off-with-ganesha-gita-and-samosas\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Shuttle Astronaut Sunita Blasts off with Ganesha, Gita and Samosas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"source\"><a HREF=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/World\/The_United_States\/Sunita_off_with_Gita_samosas\/articleshow\/763425.cms\">timesofindia.indiatimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"summary\">CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, December 11, 2006: Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams blasted into space Sunday carrying a Lord Ganesha Deity, the Bhagavad Gita and a packet of samosas, in addition to what the well traveled astronaut packs for a six-month stint on the International Space Station. In addition to Sunita, the shuttle Discovery is carrying Sweden&#8217;s first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang, pilot William Oefelein, Flight engineer Robert Curbeam and mission specialists Nicholas Patrick and Joan Higginbotham. Sunita was a Navy test pilot and diver before joining the astronaut program. Her father is an Indian-born doctor and her mother a homemaker of Yugoslav descent.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>timesofindia.indiatimes.com CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, December 11, 2006: Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams blasted into space Sunday carrying a Lord Ganesha Deity,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}