Kalpana Chawla Grew Up Watching Flying Club Planes Over Karnal, Orbited the Earth 252 Times on Columbia in 1997 and Became the First Indian-Born Woman in Space

Columbia lifted off from Launch Pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:46 in the afternoon, Eastern time, on 19 November 1997. Among the six people aboard STS-87 was Kalpana Chawla, born in Karnal in Haryana, a mission specialist on her first flight and the crew’s prime operator of the shuttle’s robot arm.

NASA’s mission record gives the totals. Columbia made 252 orbits and travelled 6.5 million miles in 15 days, 16 hours and 34 minutes, then landed at Kennedy at 7:20 on the morning of 5 December. The Handbook of Texas calls Chawla the first woman born in India to go to space, and says the Prime Minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, called her in orbit to tell her how proud India was.

Pushpak trainers over a small town

In her preflight interview for STS-107, which NASA published, Chawla said she had been lucky to grow up in a very small town that was “one of a handful of towns at that time which had flying clubs.” Students trained there on Pushpak aircraft, which she described as “not much different from Piper J3 Cubs.”

Chawla and her brother rode their bicycles while looking up, “which you shouldn’t be doing,” trying to see where the planes were headed. Their father once took them to the flying club and got them a ride in a Pushpak and in a glider.

J.R.D. Tata, who flew some of India’s first mail flights, was another influence, and she had seen the aircraft he flew, which hangs in an aerodrome in India. “Seeing this airplane and just knowing what this person had done during those years was very intriguing. Definitely captivated my imagination,” she said.

Indian students pick a track around the eighth grade, at about age 12, she explained. Because she meant to be an aerospace engineer, she chose physics, chemistry and mathematics. NASA’s biography records that she graduated from the Tagore school in Karnal in 1976.

Records give her birth date two ways. NASA’s 1994 announcement of her selection and its STS-107 memorial page give 1 July 1961, and Gale’s reference biography agrees. The Handbook of Texas gives 17 March 1962, and Tagore Baal Niketan, her school, says only that she was born in 1962.

Chandigarh, 1982

Chawla took a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh in 1982. “I was lucky to get into aerospace engineering at Punjab Engineering College,” she said in the NASA interview. Aircraft design was the goal then. Claiming an inkling of becoming an astronaut at that stage, she said, would be “really, really farfetched.”

As a first-year student she told people she wanted to be a flight engineer, a job she admitted she did not yet understand. On STS-107 she flew as flight engineer. According to the Handbook of Texas, she was the first woman to enrol in aerospace engineering at the college.

A roommate from those years, Dr Varinder Kaur, told the Tribune in February 2003 that “Montu,” as Chawla was nicknamed, was “determined and strong-headed,” and a topper who “had never been a bookworm.” After Chawla qualified in the GRE test for study abroad, Kaur said, her mother was reluctant to give permission or money. Chawla took a teaching assistant’s job at the college, reasoning that if she stayed away from home for a couple of years her mother might agree.

A Gale biography adds the last-minute part. Her father was away on business as the application deadline at the University of Texas at Arlington approached. When he returned and heard from his wife what their daughter hoped to do, he visited her classroom on 26 August and gave his consent. The deadline was 31 August.

Accounts of how the family felt differ in tone. Her sister-in-law, Neerja Nagpal, told the Tribune that Chawla “fought all odds” to choose aeronautical engineering against her father’s wishes, and that his pride came after her success.

Arlington, Boulder and the Harrier

A master’s degree in aerospace engineering came from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1984, and her doctorate in the same subject from the University of Colorado in 1988, NASA’s biography records. In Arlington she met Jean-Pierre Harrison, a flying instructor, according to Gale. They later married.

From 1988 she worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California on powered-lift computational fluid dynamics. Her work there simulated the complex air flows around aircraft such as the Harrier in “ground-effect.” By 1993 she was vice president and research scientist at Overset Methods in Los Altos, California, leading a team on “moving multiple body problems.”

She also flew. The licences, as NASA lists them, were a Certificated Flight Instructor’s with airplane and glider ratings, commercial pilot licences for single- and multi-engine land planes, seaplanes and gliders, and an instrument rating. Aerobatics and tail-wheel airplanes were her favourites. She became a US citizen in April 1991 and gave up her Indian citizenship to become an astronaut, the Handbook of Texas records.

Nineteen chosen from 2,962

On 8 December 1994 NASA announced 19 new astronaut candidates, chosen from 2,962 applicants. NASA had brought 122 of them to Houston for interviews and medical evaluations. Chawla was one of nine mission specialists in the class, and the release lists her as a civilian, a research scientist and vice president at Overset Methods.

In March 1995 she reported to the Johnson Space Center. After a year of training, Chawla became crew representative for the Astronaut Office’s EVA/Robotics and Computer Branches, working on Robotic Situational Awareness Displays and testing shuttle control software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory. NASA assigned her to STS-87 in November 1996 as mission specialist and prime robotic arm operator.

252 orbits

STS-87 was the fourth US Microgravity Payload flight. Its experiments studied materials science, combustion science and fundamental physics in weightlessness, and NASA’s archive records the work as “highly successful.” Spartan 201-04, the second main payload, was a free-flying observatory meant to study the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.

Chawla flew with Kevin Kregel, the commander, pilot Steven Lindsey, mission specialists Winston Scott and Takao Doi of Japan, and the Ukrainian payload specialist Leonid Kadenyuk. Doi became the first Japanese citizen to walk in space.

Gale’s biography quotes what she told the News India-Times about looking down on India: “The Ganges Valley looked majestic, mind boggling.” Other interviews, Gale reports, have her pointing out New Delhi to the crew and telling them, “I lived near there.” India’s magazine The Week put her on its cover, floating in the shuttle.

Tagore Baal Niketan says she carried a T-shirt from the school, with her picture and the school emblem and the words “TAGOREANS PROUD OF KALPANA.” NASA, at her request, also invited the school to its Summer Space Experience Programme, run by the International Space School Foundation in Houston. Kamlika and Sanchari Bose were the first two students to go, in 1998, and the programme included dinner at her home with Indian food she cooked herself.

The satellite that did not spin

Spartan was due out on 20 November, and NASA held the release a day so that the SOHO solar spacecraft, already in orbit, could come back online. On 21 November Chawla used the arm to release Spartan at 4:04 in the afternoon, Eastern time. Several minutes later it failed to execute its planned pirouette maneuver. Chawla regrappled it but received no firm capture indication, and a spin of about two degrees per second was imparted to the satellite.

On 24 November Scott and Doi spent seven hours and 43 minutes on a spacewalk and captured Spartan by hand at 9:09 in the evening, Eastern time. Spartan went back into the cargo bay on the arm, the mission report says, without having returned any solar science data.

In the mission report’s words, “all indications are that spacecraft was not properly initialized prior to deployment,” and a formal investigation board was convened. It names no individual in that account. A five-month NASA investigation, in the Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s words, “exonerated Chawla by identifying errors in software interfaces and the defined procedures of the flight crew and ground control.”

Flight engineer on a science mission

On 16 January 2003 Chawla was the last of the seven STS-107 crew members to enter Columbia, at 8:45 in the morning, Eastern time, according to the accident board’s report. The hatch closed at 9:17, and Columbia lifted off at 10:39, after 13 delays over two years.

As flight engineer and mission specialist, Chawla was on the Red Team with commander Rick Husband, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon. Two shifts kept the seven working around the clock. Among her experiments were Astroculture, the Advanced Protein Crystal Facility, Mechanics of Granular Materials and the Zeolite Crystal Growth Furnace. Before the flight she described tending a bioreactor of cell tissue grown “to better understand prostate cancer.” About 80 experiments were carried out, NASA’s biography says.

Mission training came to 4,811 hours, the report says, plus 3,500 on the payloads. Wake-up songs played in orbit, listed on NASA’s memorial page, included Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” on flight day 3 and Ravi Shankar’s “Prabhati” on flight day 7. Astronaut Office chief Kent Rominger said at her memorial service on 4 February 2003 that when her training ran long she would remind her crew, “Man, you are training to fly in space. What more could you want?”

Husband, pilot William McCool and Chawla ran landing simulations on the training computer on 30 January, then a second on 31 January, the report records.

Sixteen minutes from landing

Photographs taken after launch showed, in the accident board’s account, that one large piece and at least two smaller pieces of insulating foam separated from the left bipod ramp of the external tank at 81.7 seconds into the flight. At 81.9 seconds the larger piece struck the underside of Columbia’s left wing, near reinforced carbon-carbon panels 5 through 9.

On 1 February the deorbit burn began at 8:15:30 in the morning, Eastern time, and Columbia reached the atmosphere at 8:44:09. At 8:59:32 the last transmission from the commander was a broken “Roger.” Videos made by observers on the ground at 9:00:18 showed the orbiter disintegrating. Landing was scheduled for 9:16.

Its finding on the physical cause reads: “The physical cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing.” It also found that “Both Columbia and Challenger were lost also because of the failure of NASA’s organizational system.” All seven crew members died, including Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut.

Tributes, and what carries her name

In New Delhi on 2 February, her brother Sanjay Chawla told PTI that she “did not care about risks and was very passionate about her job.” A relative, Anil Nagpal, said the family had been “very apprehensive” about the mission and gave her an emotional send-off.

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam sent a separate message to the Governor of Haryana. “India had been especially proud that our own Kalpana Chawla was part of the space mission,” he said in it. NASA’s memorial page quotes President George W. Bush: “She left India as a student but she would see the nation of her birth, all of it, from hundreds of miles above.”

She was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal after her death, NASA’s biography records.

On 5 February 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee renamed ISRO’s weather satellite MetSat as Kalpana-1, according to ISRO’s MOSDAC archive. It had been launched on 12 September 2002 by the PSLV, the rocket described in our piece on ISRO, and was the first satellite the PSLV put into geostationary orbit. India’s first satellite, launched in 1975, carried the name of the fifth-century mathematician Aryabhata, NASA’s HEASARC records.

Chandigarh’s administration set up a Kalpana Chawla Memorial Award at Punjab Engineering College for the best aeronautical student, with Rs 25,000, a medal and a certificate. A PEC batchmate, Anup Chauhan, told the Tribune that she paid the fees of two girl students from families with little money, and that both went on to doctorates.

In Karnal, the Government of Haryana established a medical college and hospital in her name, which says it has more than 536 beds and 100 MBBS seats. Tagore Baal Niketan named its auditorium for her. A planetarium at Jyotisar is on the Handbook of Texas list, which also records that in 2004 Mars scientists named seven hills for the Spirit rover mission after the seven Columbia crew members.

The school’s page quotes her brother Sanjay: “To me, my sister is not dead. She is immortal.” It also reproduces her e-mail of 16 January 2002 to the school’s founder, Vimla Raheja: “I would very much like to fly an item for Tagore School on my next flight currently scheduled for launch on June 25th.” On 14 April 2002 she wrote back: “I am in receipt of the absolutely beautiful banner you have made for flight on Columbia.”