The Girl from Karnal Who Touched the Stars

Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, a town in the north Indian state of Haryana. Her official date of birth is 1 July 1961, though her family has said she was actually born on 17 March 1962. She was the youngest of four children.

As a little girl, she loved to lie on the roof of her house at night, looking at the stars. She drew pictures of aeroplanes. Karnal had a flying club, and she would watch the small planes take off and land, sometimes riding her bicycle there with her father.

Studying flight

At school, she was good at science and art. When she finished, she announced that she wanted to study aeronautical engineering, the science of aircraft.

It was an unusual choice for a young woman in India in the late 1970s. At Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, she was the only woman studying aeronautical engineering in her class. She graduated in 1982.

That year she moved to the United States, to continue her studies. She earned a master's degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, and then, in 1988, a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Reaching higher

After her PhD, Kalpana went to work at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, studying how air flows around aircraft in difficult conditions. She also became a pilot, licensed to fly planes, seaplanes and gliders, and a flight instructor.

In 1995, NASA selected her as an astronaut candidate, from thousands of applicants.

First flight

On 19 November 1997, Kalpana Chawla flew into space for the first time, on the Space Shuttle Columbia, on mission STS-87. She was a mission specialist and the prime operator of the shuttle's robotic arm.

She became the first woman born in India to fly in space.

During the sixteen-day mission, she and the crew orbited Earth 252 times, travelling more than ten million kilometres. Looking down at our planet, she later spoke of how small and shared it all seemed, with no borders visible from space.

The last mission

In January 2003, Kalpana flew on Columbia again, on mission STS-107, a sixteen-day science mission. The seven astronauts worked around the clock in two shifts, carrying out about eighty experiments.

But during the launch on 16 January, a piece of foam insulation had broken off the shuttle's external fuel tank and struck the edge of Columbia's left wing, damaging its heat-protection panels. Nobody on board knew how serious the damage was.

On 1 February 2003, as Columbia returned through Earth's atmosphere, superheated gases entered the damaged wing. The shuttle broke apart over Texas, just sixteen minutes before it was due to land in Florida.

All seven astronauts were killed: Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Ilan Ramon and Kalpana Chawla.

Her legacy

The disaster led to major changes in the way NASA worked and in the safety of spaceflight.

In India, Kalpana Chawla is remembered as a national heroine. Schools, hostels, scholarships, a medical college and a satellite have been named after her. In 2003, India renamed its first dedicated weather satellite, MetSat-1, as Kalpana-1 in her honour. In the United States, too, she is remembered with buildings, awards and, in 2020, a cargo spacecraft that carried supplies to the International Space Station, named the S.S. Kalpana Chawla.

She inspired a generation of Indian girls to believe that they, too, could become scientists, engineers and astronauts. Two decades later, many have.

Want to read more?

NASA's official astronaut biography of Kalpana Chawla is free online at nasa.gov. The report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board explains what happened to the shuttle and why.