Here at Qissa we like to celebrate amazing women around the world who are doing new and exciting things in their lives and work. Whether that be athletes breaking records or activists fighting for change. But we also want to remember the amazing women who came before, who opened doors and laid the foundation for others to follow. One such woman is astronaut Kalpana Chawla.
Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India in March 1962. She was the youngest of four children and she wasn’t actually formally named until she started school. Up until that point she had gone by the nickname ‘Montu’ but when she began her education she chose her own name. She chose Kalpana which means ‘idea’ or ‘imagination’. And imagination was certainly something Kalpana Chawla had. She had always been fascinated by planes and flight and, when she reached higher education, she decided to pursue aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College, even though there were limited opportunities for women to follow this career path at that time.
Chawla emigrated to the United States in the 1980s and studied at the University of Texas and the University of Colorado to receive her Masters and Postgraduate degrees. From here, she began working at NASA’s research centre, focusing on powered-lift computational fluid dynamics (which, for non-engineers like me, means how air flows around an aircraft during flight). It was around this time that Chawla also became a United States Citizen.
Jump to 1994, and Chawla is selected as an astronaut candidate. After training, she specialised in robotics and computing and tested software for space shuttles. Her first flight came in November 1997, at the age of 35. This was aboard space shuttle Columbia, which made 252 orbits of Earth in just over two weeks. Chawla worked as a mission specialist and was the prime robotic arm operator for the flight. Her fellow astronauts were all men.
Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian-born woman to go to space.
Chawla made history as the first Indian woman, and the first South Asian American woman, to fly in space. She even received a call from Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumal Gujral whilst in space(!) to congratulate her on her journey and express pride in her representing India! Chawla also worked to bring more South Asian girls into the field. From 1998 onwards, NASA invited students from Chawla’s secondary school in India to take part in their Summer Space Experience Programme. Each year, two students were chosen and Chawla always made sure to invite them to her home and speak to them about the ups and downs of working in the aeronaut industry.
In January 2000, Chawla went to space for a second time to again serve as a mission specialist. The two missions combined meant Chawla logged 30 days, 14 hours and 54 minutes in space. Very sadly, after the two week-long second mission, Chawla, along with the rest of her colleagues, died when the space shuttle broke up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Chawla was honoured with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and Congressional Space Medal of Honor in recognition of her career and sacrifice after her death. Chawla and her colleagues have also been immortalised in the form of a Mars hill and an asteroid named after each of them. In 2010, the University of Texas dedicated a memorial to Chawla at the Arlington College of Engineering which included artefacts from her life and career, including a flight suit and photographs.
Throughout her life, Chawla held numerous pilot licences, including for aeroplanes, gliders and seaplanes. Clearly she was born for a life in the sky. Chawla was an inspiration to many girls who could begin to imagine a career in space exploration or indeed in any field they set their mind to. She is the perfect example of a woman who used her imagination to imagine a different world for women, and then set that world in motion.
Three other amazing women in space exploration:
Katherine Johnson - A mathematician responsible for mapping the trajectories of the first manned American spacecraft to orbit the Earth and land on the moon. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and portrayed in the 2016 film, Hidden Figures.
Mae C Jemison - The first Black woman in space. Jemison was also a doctor who worked at a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and as the regional Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Mary Golda Ross - First female Native American engineer, the first woman to work in engineering at the aerospace giant Lockheed Corporation and the only woman on the ‘Skunk Works’ aeronautics base.
Cover image credit: Kalpana Chawla, NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
