Karnal to Cape Canaveral:A girl who went beyond blue yonder and reached for the stars
I am not sure whether to reflect upon the "profiles of courage" or hunker down in grief to bid farewell to the heroes and heroines? What began otherwise as a normal day, became a day in history with loss of seven of the best and the brightest from three nations! Most of us were getting comfortable reading headlines such as, “Kalpana Chawla flies another mission to the space!” It was a feeling unlike any other, a woman from our own backyard who made us proud with each headline. Instead the grim tributary headlines will now read, “Kalpana Chawla, first Indian woman Astronaut: 7/1/61 – 2/1/03
Here is a brief profile of her courage and glimpses of her journeys I have condensed from several articles, including how, during her first space voyge a small town in Haryana got it's finger prints engraved on the space landscape.
Who would have thought that a young Indian girl with her feet firmly on the ground would one-day fly into the heavens? While for most people outer space is uncharted territory, for Kalpana Chawla it is reality, a place to which she will blast off on November 19 on board shuttle Columbia, from the Lyndon Johnson Space Center in the United States. Her exploits have already given a high to the folks back home. "Karnal is on top of the world," cooed Vimala Raheja, principal of the Tagore Bal Niketan Senior Secondary School where Kalpana was a student in the early 70s. "We are proud of this brave girl," gushed I.D. Swami, the MP from Karnal. "Going to space, that too a girl from a small town like this, is no mean achievement."
The residents of the town, 125 km from Delhi, are planning to "celebrate the occasion in a big way," said Jang Bahadur Chauhan, the local bar association president, as "Karnal has been brought on the international map." The proudest of them all is her mother Sanyogita. "I was probably expecting a boy as my last child," she said. "But out came Kalpana, who has achieved more than a boy could." "From childhood she was different," said her brother Sanjay Chawla, a Delhi businessman. Indeed. "Kalpana was very tomboyish," reminisced Sanyogita. "She used to cut her own hair, never wore ironed clothes and learnt karate."
Her teachers remember her as an extrovert. She had a brilliant academic record and always figured among the top five students in class. "Once she prepared a project on environment in which she made huge, colourful charts and models depicting the sky and stars. Traces of her interest in space may perhaps be found in this streak," said Raheja, recalling Kalpana's school days. Two years after the youngest of four siblings joined Dayal Singh College in Karnal she was selected for the bachelor of engineering course at the Panjab University in Chandigarh. She was the only girl in the aeronautics batch. Likewise on November 19 she will be the only woman among the six-member crew on Columbia which will spend 16 days in orbit studying the effects of microgravity on a variety of materials, focusing on how metal and crystals solidify when removed from the distorting effects of gravity.
Kalpana, 35, had applied to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) along with 2,000 other candidates: in December 1994 the agency gave her the go-ahead. Four months later Kalpana landed at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston and began her training with mock-up shuttles, motion-base simulators, T-38 jets and parasails. "A lot of our training was finding malfunctions and learning survival skills," Kalpana recollected. "We had a simulator of the space shuttle cockpit where all the switch layouts and the displays are identical to the real thing."
The water survival training prepared the astronauts for mishaps. The trainees were launched from the deck of a boat by parachute. After landing in the water they had to wait for the rescuers to turn up. Said Kalpana, "They don't tell you when they'll come, but you know at the end of the day someone will get you." Even though she had a degree in aerospace engineering, NASA was looking for a candidate's ability to solve technical problems. "It's more important to have a proven track record as a scientist rather than knowledge in any specific field," explained Kalpana. "It's how someone tackles a problem that's important."
A strong desire to go out in the blue yonder:
Coming in handy was her exposure to a wide variety of computer systems at the NASA Ames Research Centre in California. As a research scientist and vice-president of Overset Methods Inc. in California she had worked at Ames in the Applied Computational Aerodynamics Branch. Yet, even she was awed when NASA gave her the green signal. "This is very far-fetched for me," she commented at her selection. "When I went to college, I had pictures of space shuttles in my dorm, I'm surprised I even had access to them."
In 1982, on the day she landed in the American University, Kalpana met Jean Pierre Harrison, a freelance-flying instructor. They hit it off. Perhaps he tingled the crushed dream to fly or it was the shared spirit of adventure that brought them close. Inspired by Jean Pierre, she took up scuba diving, hiking and went on long flying expeditions. She kept brother Sanjay informed of what was developing. Brushing aside initial doubts, he prevailed upon his parents when Kalpana said she wanted to marry Jean Pierre. They wed in 1984.
She began to think seriously of applying to the space shuttle program after qualifying for her pilot's license in 1987. Although not a requirement for acceptance in the space program, it gave her confidence, "because you know you can master other challenges when the time comes." Besides, she always loved flying." I like airplanes it's that simple. The theoretical side is mentally challenging but flying for me is sheer fun. It appeals to all my senses. The astronaut's job requires a technical background and a strong desire... to go out in the blue yonder."
How has this girl dared to reach for the skies and beyond, given her traditional family background? Father Banarsi Lal runs his business in Sonepat in Haryana and Sanyogita, a housewife, lives with the rest of the family in a south Delhi apartment. They were stunned when she told them about her desire to go to the United States.
Yet, as Kalpana explains, they retained the best of old values while remaining open to the new. "They are conservative, but very different from lots of other parents. For example, my father never gave me a hard time on career choices. There wasn't any, 'No, absolutely not.' You could always say, 'But, I want to do it.' If you said it enough times, then you would have it. In families that are truly conservative, you don't even dare ask."
Once in the US, Kalpana mapped out a path to her goals. The MCAT Institute in San Jose, California hired her as a scientist to support research in the area of powered lift at the Ames Research Centre, in 1988. She was responsible for simulation and analysis of flow physics in the operation of powered-lift aircraft such as the Harriers. In 1993 she joined Overset Methods Inc., Los Altos, California, as vice-president and research scientist, specializing in simulation of moving multiple body problems. Then came the call from NASA.
She didn't have role models in the workplace, so how did she believe enough in herself to go in for something which was considered a man's job? "I honestly didn't think of it that way," she replied. "When I joined engineering, there were only seven girls in the whole engineering college. I was the first girl to go into aerospace engineering. The department chair kept trying to channel me into electrical or mechanical, and I thought this is weird, why is he trying to do that?"
Finally, the professor got the message that she was determined to pursue aerospace engineering, and he would tell his other students, 'She's here because this is what she wants to do'. Said she: "That's the message I want to give other women: Do something because you really want to do it. Even if it is a goal which is not necessarily within reach." As a young girl Kalpana dreamed of the stars millions of miles away and then went about working on her vision.
In many ways she was like many of us, from a middle class family, from a small town, had to fight the same stereotypes, yet, she proved what some of us can only dream of!
I once used to know a Emelia Earhardt...who got lost on her voyge to discovery, a new name has now taken that place, our own Indian Kalpana Chawla...
