Kalpana Chawla

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kalpana Chawla was born in 1962 in Karnal, a city in Haryana, India, and in 1997 she was circling the Earth aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. She became an astronaut and aerospace engineer, and she was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. In 2003 she flew on Columbia a second time, and that flight was the last one the orbiter ever made.

  How did a girl from Karnal reach NASA when so many people around her pushed her toward other careers? What went wrong with a satellite during her first mission, and who was blamed for it? What happened on the final flight, and how has she been remembered since?

  43452723

• 2. A Girl From Karnal

  ›

  Banarsi Lal Chawla owned a tire manufacturing plant in Karnal, and his daughter Kalpana was born into that household on the 17th of March 1962. Her mother was Sanjogta Kharbanda. The family were Punjabi Hindus whose roots lay in Gujranwala, in West Punjab. They had crossed into East Punjab as refugees during the Partition of India in 1947.

  Kalpana had three siblings: two sisters, Sunita and Dipa, and a brother, Sanjay. Even as a child she said she was drawn to aerospace engineering. Her father brushed the idea aside. According to the source, he told her that "only guys want to do aerospace engineering" and suggested she become a doctor or a teacher.

  She attended the Tagore Baal Niketan Senior Secondary School in Karnal. She graduated in 1976, "near the top of her class". Her next stop was Dayal Singh College, also in Karnal, where the engineering courses began.

  4526142735

• 3. Chasing Aerodynamics

  ›

  At Dayal Singh College in Karnal, Chawla took basic engineering courses before moving on to the aeronautical engineering school at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh. There she studied the principles of theoretical aerodynamics. She was one of only four women in the program, and the first female student at the college to take aerospace engineering classes. Some professors told her the field did not suit women and urged her toward electrical engineering instead. She graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering.

  India offered no further specialized aerospace courses, so in 1982 she traveled to the United States to continue. Her father again opposed the move. At the University of Texas at Arlington she completed her MSc in 1984, with a thesis titled Optimization of cross flow fan housing for airplane wing installation.

  Arlington is also where she met Jean-Pierre Harrison, a pilot. The two married on the 2nd of December 1983.

  Chawla then moved to the University of Colorado Boulder, and it was there that she first decided she wanted to join the space program. She earned her PhD in 1988 with a thesis on the computation of dynamics and control of unsteady vortical flows. In Boulder she also began flying lessons at the Boulder Municipal Airport. She eventually held commercial pilot's licenses for land planes, seaplanes and gliders, and she became a certified flight instructor for single-engine airplanes and flight instruments.

  With the doctorate finished, a job at NASA's Ames Research Center came next.

  3314876

• 4. Road To Astronaut

  ›

  In 1988, Chawla started at NASA's Ames Research Center, where she studied computational fluid dynamics for vertical and short take-off and landing aircraft. She also worked out how to spread fluid flow problems across several computers. She tested those methods by calculating the effects of powered lift. At some point in the early 1990s she became a naturalized United States citizen, which NASA requires of its astronauts.

  In 1993 she joined Overset Methods, Inc, a non-profit research organization in Los Altos, California. She served there as a research scientist and as vice president. Her work focused on simulating problems that involve many moving objects.

  Life in Los Altos was not all research. She joined the West Valley Flying Club at the Palo Alto Airport, and she learned the classical dance form Bharatanatyam from the Abhinaya Dance Company in San Jose.

  In December 1994 she returned to NASA to train as an astronaut candidate at the Johnson Space Center, as part of NASA Astronaut Group 15. By 1995 she had been placed in the EVA and robotics division of the Astronaut Corps. Robotics would shape her first flight.

  31291445

• 5. Columbia and Spartan

  ›

  On the 19th of November 1997, Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on mission STS-87 with a crew of six. Chawla flew as a mission specialist, and she was a backup flight engineer during takeoff. The Indian Prime Minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, phoned to congratulate her. He spoke of national pride and praised her for inspiring Indian women and children.

  Her science work centered on the fourth United States Microgravity Payload mission, known as USMP-4. She studied how to mix liquids evenly to form particular metal combinations that might one day go into computer chips. Using Columbia's Middeck Glovebox, she worked with immiscible substances to learn why they separate.

  The mission's famous setback involved Spartan, short for the Shuttle-Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy. Chawla was assigned to release it. A power surge damaged its control system, so Spartan never performed its expected pirouette. Chawla tried to catch the satellite with the shuttle's robotic arm. The control panel never gave a clear signal that it was secured, so she backed the arm away. In the process she accidentally struck Spartan, which began spinning at two degrees per second.

  Kevin R. Kregel tried to grab the payload by matching its spin with the shuttle's, but that attempt was aborted. In the end, a spacewalk was needed to retrieve it.

  Some members of the press criticized her. Kregel declined to assign blame when he spoke to the Orlando Sentinel. He said, "We're six folks up here; we know what happened on our side." He added that the important thing was bringing Spartan home, because "it'll get to fly another day."

  NASA formed an investigating team on the 4th of December 1997. It first pointed to "crew error", but Chawla was ultimately cleared. Investigators blamed insufficient training, errors in software interfaces and poor communication with ground control.

  Across the mission she traveled 10.4 million miles in 252 orbits and logged more than 376 hours, or 15 days and 16 hours, in space. In January 1998 she took a technical assignment advising shuttle engineers on payload development and the astronaut experience. She was soon chosen to lead the Astronaut Corps' Crew Systems and Habitability department.

  817195044

• 6. The Final Flight

  ›

  On the 27th of July 2000, NASA picked Chawla for the crew of STS-107. The mission was delayed 13 times over two years. Reasons included orbiter maintenance and, on the 19th of July 2002, the discovery of cracks in the shuttle engine flow liners. It finally launched on the 16th of January 2003. As flight engineer, she assisted pilot William C. McCool during takeoff.

  STS-107 was a multidisciplinary science mission modeled on an earlier flight, STS-90. The crew split into two teams working in shifts so that experiments never stopped. Chawla joined the Red Team with Ilan Ramon, Laurel Clark and Rick Husband. Her own investigations covered astroculture, combustion, crystal growth, granular materials and mist. Across the whole crew, more than 80 experiments were performed.

  Chawla had brought three Deep Purple albums on board. She used the band's song "Space Truckin'" as a wakeup call.

  On the 1st of February, she and mission specialist Clark were tasked with assessing the shuttle's systems before reentry.

  178531321

• 7. Over Texas

  ›

  Columbia began its reentry at 8:44 a.m. on the 1st of February 2003. At 8:54 a.m., four sensors on the shuttle's wing failed. By 9:00 a.m., the shuttle was breaking apart in the sky above Texas, and all seven crew members died.

  The Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported in 2003 on what had happened. A piece of insulating foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and struck the orbiter's left wing. When Columbia reentered the atmosphere, hot gases entered the damaged wing and destroyed the shuttle.

  NASA set up a search team near Hemphill, Texas, to find the crew's remains. On the 4th or the 5th of February, NASA began moving the recovered remains to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Dover Air Force Base. By the 11th of February, the remains of every crew member, Chawla included, had been recovered. A memorial service took place in Hemphill that afternoon. Her remains were cremated and scattered at Zion National Park.

  One of the three Deep Purple albums she had carried was later found in the shuttle's wreckage.

  215339178

• 8. Names Across Worlds

  ›

  On the 3rd of February 2003, a day before the first remains reached Dover, it was announced that the girls' hostel at Punjab Engineering College would carry Chawla's name. The college also created a prize of INR 25,000, a medal and a certificate for its top aeronautical engineering students. That same month, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced that the satellite MetSat-1 would be renamed Kalpana-1.

  In August 2003, Asteroid 51826 Kalpanachawla was named for her, one of seven asteroids named for the Columbia crew. The Florida Institute of Technology named a residence building for her as part of Columbia Village, dedicated to all seven astronauts. Steve Morse of Deep Purple released the song "Contact Lost" in 2003, in memory of the disaster.

  On the 2nd of February 2004, seven peaks in the Columbia Hills on Mars were named for the crew, and one carries Chawla's name. Two days later, President George W. Bush presented her posthumous Congressional Space Medal of Honor. She also received the NASA Space Flight Medal and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

  The Government of Karnataka created the Kalpana Chawla Award for young female scientists in March. In September, the University of Texas at Arlington opened Kalpana Chawla Hall, known as KC Hall. Her father attended the dedication.

  A lunar crater named Chawla followed in 2006. In 2007, the Kalpana Chawla Planetarium was dedicated in Haryana. That year novelist Peter David also named a shuttlecraft, the Chawla, in his Star Trek novel Before Dishonor. In 2010, a memorial display was dedicated in Nedderman Hall at Arlington.

  The Kalpana Chawla Government Medical College was established in Karnal in 2017. In 2020, the second season of the National Geographic series Mega Icons focused on her, alongside A. R. Rahman, Deepika Padukone and Ratan Tata. The 14th contracted Northrop Grumman Cygnus mission to the International Space Station, launched in October 2020, was named the S.S. Kalpana Chawla.

  In the 2023 movie A Million Miles Away, a fictionalized Chawla appears, played by the actress Sarayu Blue.

  3454411046