On 23 May 2013 at the City Museum of Ljubljana, Mayor Zoran Janković held a reception for American astronaut of Slovene ancestry Sunita L Williams, who participated in opening the exhibition ‘THE WHEEL, 5200 years’.

Sunita L Williams is only the second woman to have been in command of the International Space Station, and has flown into space twice in the last six years. In 2006 she flew to the ISS aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, spending the next 195 days in space, breaking the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, a record she still holds.

Last year, Williams launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, adding to her list of achievements that of becoming the second female to command the ISS. She totalled 29 hours and 17 minutes in four spacewalks, which for a period was the record for most spacewalk time by a woman.

Sunita L Williams is pleased that Slovenia is a member of the European Space Agency, and perhaps in the future this will help somebody from Slovenia to go into space, while there are currently three Americans of Slovene ancestry working on the space programme. Her wish is to let young people in Slovenia, especially girls, who would one day like to become engineers, scientists or astronauts, know that anything is possible and only we set limits upon ourselves. She is looking forward to the day that the next astronaut from Slovenia is launched into space.