“I was not born for one
corner. The whole world is my native land”. So said Kalpana Chawla
just before taking off on her second and final mission. By the time the
space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana,
Kalpana had spent an incredible 760 hours in space, she had traveled
104 million km, as many as 252 times around the earth. She was one
unassuming adventurer who really had distance to fulfill her motto,
follow your dreams.
Kalpana Chawala was born in 1961 in Karnal, a small town in Haryana. She attended a local school,
Tagore Ball Nietan where she was an above average student with a
fascination for airplanes. She enrolled at Punjab Engineering College,
where there were only seven girls. She becomes the first woman to study
aeronautical engineering. She topped and then she moved to Colorado
University to do her doctorate, which she completed in 1998. She is the
second Colorado University product to perish on a space mission,
Ellison Onizuka died in the challenger explosion in January 1986.
Kalpana joined NASA in 1988. She started out at the NASA Ames Research Center
in the area of powered lift computational fluid dynamics. In 1993 she
joined overset Methods, Los Altos, California, as vice-president. In
December 1994, NASA accepted her application and by March 1915, Chawla
reported to the Johnson Space Center as a candidate in the 15th
Group of Astronauts. Her path to the stars was paved with increasingly
complex and technical requirement which is difficult for any layman to
comprehend, yet it didn’t deter Chawal. Her big moment arrived with
the space shuttle flight STS-87, in November-December 1997. It was a 16-day mission. She studied weightlessness and the sun’s outer atmospheric layers. The numbers: 6.5 million miles, 252 orbits of Earth, and 376 hours and 84 minutes in space.
Back on Earth, Kalpana was given various crew systems
task. But she craved for a second chance. By January 1998, she was on
her way to participate for the second time in the
Olympics of space. She worked very hard and in 2000, she was assigned
to the crew of STS-107 scheduled for launch in 2003, January. The US
space shuttle Columbia lifted off on January 16, 2003. Kalpana Chawla
and six others consisted the crew. Columbia’s crew completed 80-plus
scientific research experiments during their time in orbit. After a
16-day mission on February Ist. Columbia was returning to earth. It was
at an attitude of 63,000 metres and was hurtling back to Earth at a
speed of over 20,000 km/hr, around 18 times the speed of sound and was
due to land at the Kennedy Space Center
in Florida at 8.53 a. m., a little after seven in the evening in
India. But the ill-fated shuttle could not reach the Earth safely. At
an altitude of 207,000 feet over north-central Texas, Mission control
lost contact and it crashed few minutes later before landing. In 42
years of U.S. human space flight, there had never been an accident
during the descent to Earth or landing. Space-shuttle Columbia was
unfortunately the first.
Known as Montu didi in her native land and as KC at
NASA, Kalpana Chawal was the girl next door who never forgot the pull of
her roots. It is only because of her efforts that since 1977, NASA has
been hosting two students from her alma mater every year. She always
proudly introduced herself as Kalpana Chawla
from Karnal, India. Our Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee dedicated
an Indian Space Research Oraganisation (ISRO) meteorological satellite
to her, calling it kalpana-1, while the Haryana government set up
the Kalpana Chawla scholarship for girl students. The Chandigarh
Administration instituted a cash award of Rs. 25,000 and a gold medal
for the best student of aeronautical engineering. Union Minister of
state for Home I.D. Swami, an M.P.from Karnal promised to dedicate a
medical college to her memory and even her alma mater, the PEC, is
considering to name a research center after her.
Kalpana once said that from space our Earth looks so
small, so fragile. It is unbelievable that we, people fight over petty
things and piece of land. In her last interview, in her message for
Indian children she said, “The quickest way may not necessarily be the
best. The journey matters as much as the goal. Listen to the sounds of
nature. Wishing you the best on your trek towards your dreams. Take good
care of our fragile planet’’.
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