Kalpana Chawla (; March 17, 1962 – February 1, 2003) was an Indian-born American astronaut, aerospace engineer, and pilot who was the first woman of Indian heritage to fly into space. Chawla participated in two spaceflights, STS-87 and STS-107, in 1997 and 2003, respectively. On both of these flights, she conducted scientific experiments researching the effects of microgravity on various physical processes. When the crew members in STS-107 descended back to Earth, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated due to damage it sustained at liftoff. This killed all seven astronauts on board, including Chawla.
Chawla was born in Karnal, Haryana, India, to Banarsi Lal Chawla and Sanjyothi Chawla. She had three older siblings: Sunita, Dipa, and Sanjay Chawla. Chawla developed an interest in crewed flight after observing a plane passing over her at the age of three, deciding that she wanted to become an aerospace engineer at the age of 12. She attended Tagore Baal Niketan Senior Secondary School and, after graduating from there, Dayal Singh College. Despite opposition from her father, she transferred from the college to take engineering classes at Punjab Engineering College, from which she obtained a Bachelor of Engineering (BEng). She then emigrated to the United States, where she obtained her MSc from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). While at CU Boulder, she obtained various pilot licenses, Instrument ratings, and flight instructor certificates. She became a naturalized US citizen in the early 1990s.
Chawla's professional career began when she was hired to work at NASA's Ames Research Center in 1988. There, she conducted research into computational fluid dynamics. She then joined Overset Methods, Inc., becoming the vice president of the organization in 1993. In 1994, she returned to NASA in the hopes of becoming an astronaut, undergoing a year of training before being assigned as a mission specialist and robotic arm operator in her first space mission, STS-87. Her performance in the mission caused some controversy due to the failed deployment of the Shuttle-Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN) module.
Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Several buildings, spacecraft, and extraterrestrial landmarks have been named in her honor. In addition, numerous documentaries and biographies have been written about both her life and the Columbia disaster she was in. Over the years, she has become a household name in India because of her ethnicity and achievements, with scholarships and awards being made in her honor, usually to promote female or Indian participation in space exploration.
Early life and education Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962, in Karnal, Haryana, India. Her father, Banarsi Lal Chawla, was the owner of a tire manufacturing plant. Her mother, Sanjogta Kharbanda, was the daughter of a doctor. Both of her parents were Punjabi Hindus who were originally from Gujranwala in West Punjab, having traveled to East Punjab as refugees during the Partition of India in 1947. She had three siblings: sisters Sunita and Dipa and brother Sanjay, of whom she was the youngest.
At the time of her birth, Chawla did not have a legal name. Although she was informally called "Montu" by her parents, it was not until she entered school that she chose her own name from a selection of names her parents presented to her. The name "Kalpana" translates to "idea" or "imagination", which was the reason she chose it. Relatives and friends often called her "KC", the initials of her first and last name.
As a child, she developed an interest in airplanes after seeing one at the age of three. At the age of 12, she decided that she wanted to become an aerospace engineer. However, this idea was dismissed by her father, who said that "only guys want to do [aerospace engineering]", instead recommending her to become a doctor or teacher. Despite this, she began specializing in science courses such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the Tagore Baal Niketan Senior Secondary School in Karnal, graduating in 1976 "near the top of her class."
In 1977, Chawla took a year of pre-university education at Kumari Vidyavati Anand DAV College for Women, also in Karnal. Afterward, she attended basic engineering courses at Dayal Singh College. Because there were no engineering colleges in her hometown, she then moved to Chandigarh to attend the aeronautical engineering school at Punjab Engineering College, where she studied the principles of theoretical aerodynamics. She was one of four women in the program and the first female student to take aerospace engineering classes at the college. However, some professors discouraged her from studying aerospace engineering, suggesting it was not suitable for women and advising her to study courses such as electrical engineering instead. She graduated from the college in 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering.
Because she could not take further specialized aerospace engineering courses in India, Chawla traveled to the US to continue her education in 1982. She won a scholarship for University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), the college she was interested in, but required her father's permission before being allowed to attend. However, she again faced opposition from her father until he learned more about her accomplishments and aspirations, after which he conceded and helped her obtain an American visa to study at UTA. She earned her MSc from the university in 1984 with the thesis Optimization of cross flow fan housing for airplane wing installation. She also met her husband, pilot Jean-Pierre Harrison, while at the school, and the two married on December 2, 1983.
Chawla then attended CU Boulder, where she first decided that she wanted to join the space program, receiving her PhD in 1988 with the thesis Computation of dynamics and control of unsteady vortical flows. While attending CU Boulder, Chawla began taking flying lessons at the Boulder Municipal Airport, eventually receiving commercial pilot licenses permitting her to fly various types of land and seaplanes, as well as gliders. She also received instrument ratings for airplanes and later became certified as a flight instructor for single-engine airplanes and flight instruments.
Career
NASA
In 1988, Chawla began working at NASA's Ames Research Center, where she initially conducted computational fluid dynamics research on vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) concepts. Her research there mostly focused on the simulation of air flow around aircraft such as the Harrier, with particular focus on the ground effect. She subsequently studied how to use multiple computers to solve fluid flow problems, testing these methods by calculating powered lift effects. Sometime in the early 1990s, she became a naturalized US citizen, a requirement for becoming a NASA astronaut.
Chawla joined Overset Methods, Inc., a non-profit research organization based in Los Altos, California, as both a research scientist and the organization's vice president in 1993. Her work focused on simulating problems involving multiple moving objects and designing techniques to support aerodynamic optimization. In December 1994, she returned to NASA to undergo training as a candidate astronaut at the Johnson Space Center as part of NASA Astronaut Group 15. As part of this training, she attended classes in various sciences relevant to spaceflight, such as space medicine, planetary science, and materials science. She was also required to take classes teaching skills ranging from flying certain aircraft to parasail flight and scuba.
Eventually, she was eligible to work on technical assignments in office settings, which led up to assignments as a crew member in space shuttles. In 1995, she was assigned to the extravehicular activity and robotics divisions of the NASA Astronaut Corps. In the corps, she was made a crew representative to work on the technical issues that would arise in NASA's robotics. Most of her working time was spent in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, where she developed Robotic Situational Awareness Displays and test space shuttle control software.
First space mission
Chawla's first space mission began on November 19, 1997, as part of the six-astronaut crew that flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia flight STS-87. It was the fourth flight to hold the US Microgravity Payload (USMP-4) and Spartan 201 module, two of its payloads with which to conduct experiments on microgravity and the Sun's outer atmosphere, respectively. In the mission, Chawla served as a mission specialist, robotic arm operator, and backup flight engineer during liftoff. After STS-87 launched, Chawla became the first woman of Indian origin to go to space; Inder Kumar Gujral, the then prime minister of India, called her to congratulate her on her flight, expressing pride on behalf of the people of India and lauding Chawla for inspiring Indian women and children.
Chawla supervised and performed experiments in STS-87. As part of the mission, Chawla studied how to mix liquids evenly to create specific metal combinations that could be used in future computer chips. Using Columbia's Middeck Glovebox, she worked with immiscibles to understand the causes behind their separation.
Chawla was assigned to deploy the SPARTAN during the mission. Due to a power surge that damaged its control system, the SPARTAN failed to perform its expected pirouette movement minutes after she had deployed it. Chawla attempted to grapple the satellite with the shuttle's robotic arm but did not receive a clear signal on the control panel showing it was secured, causing her to move the arm back. In the process, she accidentally hit the SPARTAN, making it spin at two degrees per second. Fellow astronaut Kevin R. Kregel also attempted to grapple the payload by matching its spin with the shuttle's, but this movement was ultimately aborted. In the end, astronauts Winston E. Scott and Takao Doi performed a spacewalk to retrieve the payload.
Some members of the press criticized Chawla for her handling of the SPARTAN payload, but Kregel refused to assign blame in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel:
NASA formed a team to investigate the deployment failure on December 4, 1997. The investigation initially attributed the failure to "crew error", but Chawla was ultimately exonerated, with the investigators citing insufficient training, errors in software interfaces, and poor communication with ground control as the causes of the incident. In all, by the end of the STS-87 mission on December 5, 1997, Chawla traveled 10.4 million miles in 252 orbits of the Earth, logging more than 376 hours (15 days and 16 hours) in space.
Chawla's spaceflight was widely reported around the world. She became especially well-known in India, with an image of her taken while she was in the shuttle being used as a cover image for The Week, an Indian news magazine and one of the largest published in English. In an interview with The New York Times, the head of the Washington office of the Indian Space Research Organization said that "After her first flight, she became a national hero."
After the mission, in January 1998, Chawla was assigned to be a crew representative for shuttle and station flight crew equipment. She was given a technical assignment advising shuttle engineers on different aspects of payload development and the astronaut experience. Soon after, she was selected to head the Astronaut Corps's Crew Systems and Habitability department.
Second space mission and death