Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawla.
Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawla.
As Sunita Williams and Butch Willmore make their journey back to Earth aboard the Crew Dragon capsule, it is impossible not to think of Kalpana Chawla, who died along with six more astronauts when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere 16 minutes before its scheduled landing on February 1, 2003.
Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawla were friends. They both loved samosas, among other things.
“We had, obviously, things in common, Indian food being number one,” Williams had said in an interview with Khabar magazine. “Columbia happened about three months after I was assigned to my first spaceflight and I thought, ‘Wow, I just lost some really good friends. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to fly in space again.’ There was a long investigation, took about two years. But I thought, “I’m doing whatever I can to help this program move forward. And that’s okay.”
Born on March 17, 1962, in Karnal, Haryana, Kalpana— called ‘Monto’—was a child of resilience. Her father, Banarasi Lal Chawla, had witnessed the horrors of Partition. His daughter inherited the same unyielding spirit.
She dared to become an aeronautical engineer when few women chose that path. She became an astronaut who etched her name in history.
Her teachers remember her as a diligent student with an unshakable resolve.
“She did not want to be just another girl who would get married and settle down. That is why she was a bit of a rebel,” Daljit Kaur, deputy director of Tagore Bal Niketan School in Karnal, told Rediff.com a year after the Columbia disaster.
For a geography project, she once built a model of the universe using old newspapers, complete with stars and the moon.
After earning her engineering degree, Kalpana moved to the US, where she completed her masters and PhD in aerospace engineering. Her research led her to Nasa’s Ames Research Center in 1988, where she worked on powered-lift computational fluid dynamics.
In 1993, she became vice president and research scientist at Overset Methods Inc., specialising in simulations of moving multiple body problems.
Nasa selected her as an astronaut candidate in December 1994. She reported to the Johnson Space Center in March 1995, and by 1996, they assigned her as a mission specialist for the STS-87 mission aboard Columbia.
In 1997, when Kalpana became the first woman of Indian origin to go to space, she carried a T-shirt from her school in Karnal.
Kalpana Chawla was not just an astronaut.
She enjoyed flying, hiking, and backpacking. She believed the outdoors taught her “basic survival skills.” Her house was surrounded by greenery, and after her first flight, she planted a sapling in her garden, insisting on using natural fertilisers.
Her love for Indian classical music was profound. She adored flautist Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia and cherished the songs of Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh, and Begum Akhtar.
In 2003, Kalpana boarded Columbia for the STS-107 mission, logging a total of 30 days, 14 hours, and 54 minutes in space across her two missions.
She had once told her family that she wanted to die in space.
Apart from Chawla, the crew that perished included US Air Force Colonel Rick Husband, US Navy Commander William McCool, US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anderson, US Navy Captains David Brown and Laurel Clark, and Israeli Air Force Colonel Ilan Ramon.
Kalpana Chawla was the flight engineer.
To world leaders, she was the courageous astronaut who reached for the stars. To millions in India, she was an inspiration, a beacon of pride.
To her friends, she was simply “KC” — determined, confident, and kind. To her nieces, nephews, and the children of her school, she was their beloved ‘Didi.’ Her name lives on in a satellite, a hill on Mars, and a medical college in her hometown of Karnal.
And as the universe would have it, Sunita Williams returns home from space just two days after Kalpana Chawla’s birthday.