|
Magazine
Symbol of pride
AGENCIES
|
From childhood, her dream was to fly high. Remembering Kalpana Chawla.
|
Determined to succeed ... Kalpana Chawla getting ready to enter the shuttle.
THEY had come to celebrate. Instead, friends and relatives of Indian-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla wailed in grief or sat in shocked silence. Through Sunday morning, people streamed to the house where the aerospace engineer was born in the northern Indian country town of Karnal and where many had gathered for a party to mark her return from a mission aboard the Columbia space shuttle.
"She used to stand on the verandah and look at stars for hours when she was a kid," relative Vijay Sethia said. The 41-year-old Chawla, a symbol of pride for the people of Karnal and millions of other Indians, was one of the seven crew aboard the Columbia killed when it broke up on re-entry.
She was the first Indian-born crew member of a U.S. space mission and the country's second astronaut. Through the night and into Sunday, many more people gathered at the Tagore school — known to everyone here as Kalpana's school — where Chawla once built a model space shuttle for a class project. "Yesterday, all of us had gathered here to watch her landing live — it is hard to believe that she is not among us now," said 16-year-old student Sanpreet Kaur, wearing a space shuttle badge Chawla gave her during a visit to NASA.
It was Chawla's second shuttle mission. She moved to the United States after graduating from Punjab Engineering College in 1982 and she joined NASA in 1988. Married and without children, Chawla, logged 376 hours in space as a mission specialist on her first flight in 1997. "When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system," Chawla said in a 1998 interview with India Today.
On her only other spaceflight, in 1997, she made mistakes that sent science satellite tumbling out of control. Other astronauts had to go on space walk to capture it. NASA later acknowledged that the instructions to the crew might not have been clear. The mistake shook her confidence, and she feared her space career was over. But her concern was misplaced. "Some of the senior people, the very senior astronauts, shook my hand and said, `K.C., you did a great job. Don't let anyone tell you different'," Dr. Chawla told the University of Texas at Arlington magazine.
Adesh Gupta, a childhood friend said: "It was a privilege sharing the same bench with Kalpana in school for about eight years. She was never extraordinary but she stood out for her determination."
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
