Celebrating Women's History

Kalpana Chawla

Birth: July 1, 1961
Death: February 1, 2003
Nationality: Indian-born American
Occupation: Astronaut, Aerospace engineer
Source: Biography Resource Center Online. Gale Group, 2004.
Updated: 2003

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Her family's legacy was one of triumph over tragedy, and for Kalpana Chawla the dream of adding to her family's legacy was to materialize when she went into space in 1997 as the first Indian woman to do so. On February 1, 2003, as a member of the ill-fated Columbia shuttle crew, Chawla would be honored for a life she lived too briefly--but during which she realized spectacular achievements against great odds.

Family odyssey

Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India, in 1961, the youngest of the four children of Banarsi Lal Chawla and Sanjogta Kharbanda. Both of them had the childhood experience of fleeing their homes during the late 1940s when India was torn apart by the struggle between Hindus and Muslims following the country's independence from Britain on August 15, 1947. Chawla's father himself narrowly escaped with his life, and eventually settled with his extended family far away from their ancestral village. Kharbanda was the daughter of a doctor. Her father eventually established a successful tire manufacturing business. The couple had daughters Sunita, and Deepa, then son, Sanjay, before their youngest daughter was born. Chawla, like her siblings, was an above-average student while attending the Tagore Bal Niketan Senior Secondary School in Karnal from which she graduated among the top five students in 1976. Chawla's mother told Darryl Fears for an article in the Washington Post that her daughter "was different." "She used to cut her own hair, never wore ironed clothes, learned karate." One of her teachers recounted a project she had done on the environment, making "huge, colorful charts and models depicting the sky and stars." From her earliest childhood, she and her brother shared an interest in flying--something that he would have to give up eventually due to medical concerns.

When she announced to her father that she wanted to study aerospace engineering in college, he told her she should study to be a doctor or teacher, "a more respectable profession," according to Michael Cabbage, writing a biography on the astronaut for the Orlando Sentinel. He would not accompany her to her interview, leaving that task to her mother. Undeterred by a male professor, who told her that engineering was "unladylike," Chawla obtained a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Punjab Engineering College in India, in 1982. Though her father had hoped she and Sanjay would join him in the tire business, Chawla had other ideas. She was at the top of her class in engineering at the university and had been offered a job in her own college--but was accepted at the University of Texas for a master's also in aeronautical engineering. Because her father was traveling for his business at the time and no one but he could make the decision, Chawla took the teaching position. She had already attempted to go to flight school when her brother went but was unable to join the class without the consent of her father. When her father refused, her brother offered the advice that she must fight her own battles.

In his story to Josy Joseph for the web news organization, The Rediff Special, Chawla's father told the story of how he first discovered his daughter's wish was to go to America to study. "I returned after two months and reach Karnal late one evening. Kalpana was supposed to be home, but she wasn't. I asked about her. She is in Chandigarh, I was told. And then, someone said, 'Anyway why are you asking? You don't have time for her.' " he recalled after his daughter's death. When it set off a family revolt in a family whose wife and daughters were more liberal than the average woman of his community, he went to see Chawla who had already started her teaching position. The August 31 deadline for admission to Texas was fast approaching, only five days away. Determined to go when she could earn the money in another year, she was angry at her father for "destroying" her career. Then he told her that he was willing to provide the money for her, managing to call in some favors and get her a passport in only one day, and arrange for a visa the next. Only two days later, Chawla was ready to get on a flight for Texas with her brother when it was first delayed, and then canceled. She was able to arrange to be admitted late, with the university picking up her and her brother at the airport.

American odyssey

Chawla finished her master's in 1984, and entered the University of Colorado in 1988 in order to work toward her doctorate. That same year Chawla married Jean Pierre Harrison whom she had met on the day she landed in America for the first time. Harrison was a freelance flying instructor, and introduced Chawla to scuba diving, hiking, and long flying expeditions. She kept her brother informed of her budding relationship, and it was he who helped persuade their parents to let his sister marry Harrison. In 1988 Chawla received her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.

Her Ph.D. in hand, Chawla began working at the NASA Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay area, with powered-lift computational fluid dynamics. The stimulation of complex air flows encountered around spacecraft was the focus of her research. When Chawla completed that project, she began mapping flow solvers to parallel computers, and testing these solvers by carrying out powered lift computations in support of her research. Chawla took a position with Overset Methods, Inc. in Los Gatos in the heart of the Silicon Valley. She served as vice president and as a research scientist forming a team with other researchers who specialized in simulation of moving multiple body problems. Chalwa's job was to oversee the development and implementation of efficient techniques to perform aerodynamic optimization. Her work and its results were presented at conferences and published in professional journals.

NASA

On what Fears described as a "lark," Chawla joined a pool of 2,000 astronaut candidates. She did not think she would be accepted, and had never really expressed interest in being an astronaut to her colleagues around her. Nonetheless, Chawla was chosen for the astronaut program in December 1994 and reported to the Johnson Space Center in Texas in March 1995, a candidate in the 15th group of astronauts. At only five-feet tall, and weighing only 90 pounds, the challenge for Chawla was having her feet reach the pedals of the Pitts X2-B airplane. According to Fears, "The white spacesuit that astronauts were required to wear when transferring from the shuttle to the station didn't fit. There are two sizes, large and medium--no petites. Chawla was relegated to internal duties inside the shuttle."

When her year of training and evaluation was completed, Chawla was assigned as crew representative to work technical issues for the Astronaut Office EVA/Robotic Situational Awareness Displays, and also included testing space shuttle control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory. By November 1996 Chawla was named a mission specialist and prime robotic arm operator on STS-87. Her first flight into space came on November 19, 1997. The STS-87 was the fourth U. S. Microgravity Payload flight. The focus of its experiments were designed to study how the weightless environment of space affects various physical processes, and on observations of the Sun's outer atmospheric layers. Before returning to earth on December 5, the spacecraft made 252 orbits, traveling 6.5 million miles in 376 hours and 34 minutes.

When the space crew for the Columbia STS-107 was chosen, the five men and two women would end up spending more time together than most other crews in history--in part, due to delays in the schedule. Through the team's rigorous training and daily lives, they were prepared for their adventure in space that took off on January 16 and was set to return on February 1. Chawla was excited about her second trip and had sent an e-mail to a friend from space saying that having the chance at another trip was "like having a wonderful dream again." As a member of the Red Team, Chawla worked with the commander, Rick Husband, responsible for maneuvering Columbia. The experiments on which she also worked included Astroculture (AST); Advanced Protein Crystal Facility (APPCF); Commerical Protein Crystal Growth (CPCG_PCF); Biotechnology Demonstration System (BDS); ESA Biopack (eight experiments); Combustion Module (CM-2), including the Laminar Soot Processes (LSP), Water Mist Fire Suppression (MIST), and Structures of Flame Balls at Low Lewisnumber (SOFBALL) experiments; Mechanics of Granular Material (MGM); Vapor Compression Distillation Flight Experiment (VCD FE); and, the Zeolite Crystal Growth Furnace (ZCG).

When the shuttle blew apart just 16 minutes away from landing, Chawla took her place in history, and left many behind to praise her spirit and her ambition. She once described her first trip in space by saying that, "In the pre-sleep period, when you're looking out the window, you're floating. The Nile River looks like a lifeline in the Sahara." She concluded by remarking that, "Earth is very beautiful. I wish everyone could see it."

Plans to honor Chawla in her native country were being made shortly after her death, including an entire chapter devoted to her in the IT (Information Technology)@School textbook, even though space technology was not usually a part of the text, instructions were to be included on "do exercises" based on the life and activities of Chawla, according to Business Line. An article on Chawla's life was also to be included. On February 6, 2003, Chawla was honored with a minute of silence in the Goa Assembly in India, as well.

FURTHER READINGS

Periodicals

• "IT@Schhool to feature Kalpana Chawla." Business Line. March 25, 2003.
• Cabbage, Michael. "Kalpana Chawla biography." Orlando Sentinel. Feb. 1, 2003.
• Chaudhuri, Himika. "For Prerna, inspiration means Kalpana." Times of India. Feb. 6, 2003.
• Fears, Darryl. "Sky-High Ambition and a Love of Flight." Washington Post. Feb. 6, 2003, p. A17.
• Hewitt, Bill, et al. "Farewell Columbia: Families, friends and Americaa mourn the loss--and celebrate the remarkable, accomplished, adventurous live--of seven astronauts who died doing what they loved." People Weekly. Feb. 17, 2003, p.90+.
• "When women reach for the sky." Korea Herald. Feb. 7, 2003.
• Kosova, Weston; Seibert, Sam; Mnookin, Seth; Hammer, Joshua. "The Right Stuff: THE CREW: Pilots with Ph.D.'s aanddd soldiers who were scientists, the Columbia astronauts were talented and tough." Newsweek. Feb. 10, 2003, p.30.
• McLeod, Michael. "Last morning on shuttle was exciting but uneventful for crew until end." Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Feb. 7, 2003, p.K0257.
• Melwani, Lavina; and, Jha, Lalit K. "Space Woman." The Week. Nov. 9, 1997.
• "Destiny's child." The Statesman (India). Feb. 14, 2003.
• "Goa Assembly mourns Kalpana, Palkhivala." Times of India. Feb. 10, 2003.
• "Institute award in Kalpana's memory, ISRO told." Times of India. Feb. 18, 2003.

Other

• "Kalpana Chawla, Ph.D. NASA Astronaut." Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. February 2003, http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/.
• "Mission Specialist 2: Kalpana Chawla" National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). February 22, 2003, http://www.nasa.gov/.
• Joseph, Josy. "The Chawlas' odyssey." The Rediff Special. February 7, 2003, http://www.rediff.com/.
• Rivers, Caryl. "Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla Lived Our Dreams." Women's eNews. Feb. 5, 2003, http://www.womensenews.org/.
• Sharma, Rosshan L. "India's Partition." EcoNets. May 3, 2003, http://www.econets.com/Ecoauthor.html.

SOURCE CITATION

"Kalpana Chawla." Biography Resource Center Online. Gale Group, 2004.
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