Kalpana Chawla: The Girl From Karnal Who Reached Space Twice

Karnal, Haryana didn't have an engineering college in the early 1980s, so a teenage girl who wanted to study aerospace engineering had to leave home for Chandigarh just to start. Her father wanted her to become a teacher or a doctor — stable, respectable professions for a woman in a small Haryana town. She wanted to build things that flew. By 1997, she'd flown further than almost anyone: 10.67 million kilometers, 252 times around the Earth, as the first woman of Indian origin ever to reach space.

Kalpana Chawla's story doesn't end with that triumph. It ends, six years later, with a second mission that never made it home — and a legacy that outgrew the tragedy that closed it.

Timeline

• 1962 — Born March 17 in Karnal, Punjab (now Haryana), the youngest of four children.

• 1982 — Earns a B.Eng. in Aeronautical Engineering from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, having moved cities to study a subject not offered at home.

• 1984 — Moves to the United States; earns an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington.

• 1988 — Earns a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder.

• 1988 — Joins NASA Ames Research Center, working on Vertical/Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft research.

• 1993 — Becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen; joins Overset Methods Inc. as a research scientist and vice president.

• 1994 — Selected by NASA for astronaut training.

• 1997 — Flies her first space mission, STS-87, aboard Columbia, becoming the first woman of Indian origin in space; logs 252 orbits of Earth.

• 2000 — Selected for a second mission, STS-107.

• January 16, 2003 — Launches on Columbia's STS-107 mission after repeated delays.

• February 1, 2003 — Dies when Columbia disintegrates during re-entry over Texas, 16 minutes before scheduled landing, along with all six of her crewmates.

Early Life

Kalpana was born in 1962 in Karnal, then part of Punjab, to Banarasi Lal Chawla, who ran a small manufacturing business, and Sanjyothi Chawla. Family accounts describe her as fascinated by flight and astronomy from a young age, watching planes at the local flying club and reportedly sketching them long before she had any path toward actually building one. Because Karnal had no engineering college, pursuing her interest meant leaving home as a teenager — first for a year of pre-engineering study, then for Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, where she earned her aeronautical engineering degree in 1982, one of very few women in the program.

She moved to the United States that same year for graduate study, earning a master's degree from the University of Texas at Arlington and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1988 — building, degree by degree, toward a field almost no Indian woman before her had entered.

Achievements

After her Ph.D., Kalpana joined NASA Ames Research Center, researching aircraft that could take off and land vertically or on very short runways. She became a U.S. citizen in 1993, and the following year NASA selected her for astronaut training — a competitive process with a small fraction of applicants accepted.

In 1997, she flew as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator on STS-87, becoming the first woman of Indian origin to travel to space. The mission completed 252 orbits of Earth over nearly 16 days. She later described the experience simply: watching continents pass beneath her, thunderstorms shimmering in the clouds, city lights at night — and wishing everyone could see it.

In 2000, NASA selected her for a second mission, STS-107, a 16-day research flight that would eventually involve nearly 80 microgravity experiments across earth science, technology, and astronaut health. The mission launched on January 16, 2003, after repeated delays. She was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

Challenges

Kalpana pursued a field with essentially no path for women in the India she grew up in — no local college even offered the degree she wanted, and her own family initially favored a more conventional career for her. She competed for one of NASA's astronaut slots against thousands of applicants from a country not her own by birth. Her second mission ended in catastrophe: an unnoticed piece of foam insulation had struck Columbia's wing during launch, causing damage that led directly to the shuttle's disintegration during re-entry — a failure in the spacecraft, not in her or her crew, that took her life sixteen minutes before the mission would have ended successfully.

Legacy

Seven asteroids were named for the Columbia crew as a “celestial memorial.” NASA named seven hills on Mars in their honor. A cargo spacecraft, the Cygnus NG-14, was christened the S.S. Kalpana Chawla in 2020. In India, a medical college in her home city of Karnal now carries her name, along with numerous scholarships, hostels, and academic buildings across the country.

More than the honors, Kalpana Chawla remains one of the most cited role models for Indian girls considering STEM careers — proof, repeated in classroom after classroom since 2003, that the path from a small town with no engineering college to the edge of space was, for at least one girl from Karnal, entirely real.

Sources

Wikipedia: Kalpana Chawla. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Kalpana Chawla.” Space.com, “Kalpana Chawla: Biography & Columbia Disaster.” University of Texas at Arlington, UTA Magazine alumni memorial. Kalpana Chawla Government Medical College, Karnal, official biography page.

Related Women

Bachendri Pal — another Indian woman who reached a literal, physical extreme few had reached before her, opening a path others could follow.

Tessy Thomas — the Missile Woman, whose career in Indian aerospace engineering follows the same trajectory Kalpana pioneered: a field with almost no women in it, entered anyway.