Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962, in Karnal, Haryana, India. She was the youngest of four siblings. During summer nights on the rooftop, she would gaze in wonder at the stars glittering across the sky.
Born in Karnal, Chawla was fascinated by flight from childhood. She held multiple pilot licenses, including licenses for airplanes, gliders, and seaplanes.
Education
Undergraduate studies: Kalpana completed her schooling at Tagore Bal Niketan Senior Secondary School in Karnal and passed class twelve in 1978. Her dream was to study engineering, but her father believed teaching or medicine were better choices for girls. Kalpana stayed firm and refused to study anything other than engineering.
With her mother's support, she finally received permission to pursue that dream and enrolled at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh. In 1982, she completed her bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering, ranked third in her class, and became the first female graduate from that college.
Postgraduate studies: Because of her excellent results and her active involvement with the college's Aero and Astro Society, she easily earned the opportunity to study for a master's degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in the United States. Recalling her childhood in an interview, she said,
We used to ask our father to take us on airplane rides, and he would take us on Pushpak and toy planes. I think that is what connected me to aerospace engineering.
She earned her first master's degree from the University of Texas in 1984. She later completed a second master's degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1986.
PhD: She finished her doctoral studies in 1988 and earned a PhD.
In her personal life, Kalpana married French citizen Jean-Pierre Harrison in 1983. They had no children. She became a United States citizen in 1991.
After completing her PhD in 1988, Chawla joined NASA's Ames Research Center, where she specialized in computational fluid dynamics for aircraft. She later continued aerodynamics research in the private sector. NASA selected her as an astronaut in late 1994, and she began astronaut training in 1995.
Alongside spaceflight preparation, astronauts also work on ground-based technical projects. Chawla contributed to the development of the Robotic Situational Awareness Display, a tool that helped astronauts operate robotic arms. She also tested Space Shuttle control software.
Kalpana Chawla spent more than thirty days in space across two Space Shuttle missions. Her talent and intelligence quickly earned her a place in human spaceflight.
First Space Mission
She first received the opportunity to join a space mission in 1996, and that marked the beginning of her first journey into space. On November 19, 1997, she flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia with six other astronauts from Kennedy Space Center. NASA named the mission STS-87, the shuttle's twenty-fourth flight. In orbit, the crew circled Earth 252 times and traveled about 16.2 million miles. One of their main tasks was to send microgravity research data back to mission control. During STS-87, Chawla was responsible for deploying the Spartan satellite, which malfunctioned and later had to be recovered during a spacewalk by Winston Scott and Takao Doi. A five-month NASA investigation later cleared her, pointing instead to software-interface problems and procedural gaps between the crew and ground control. After the mission, she was assigned a technical role in the Astronaut Office to support space-station work.
Second Space Mission and Death
In 2000, she was selected again as a mission specialist for STS-107, the final mission of Space Shuttle Columbia. The mission had originally been expected to launch in January 2001, but repeated delays pushed the launch to 2003 from Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle spent 15 days and 22 hours in space. Just 81.7 seconds after liftoff, it suffered serious damage when a piece of foam struck the left wing, even though the mission itself continued.
As difficult as it is to hear, that is one of the harsh realities of spaceflight: once a spacecraft leaves Earth, there is often nothing anyone can do if a catastrophic failure begins.
On February 1, 2003, Columbia was scheduled to land at 7:46 p.m. Indian time on Runway 33 of the Shuttle Landing Facility. After spending 15 days, 22 hours, and 32 seconds in space, the shuttle was approaching what should have been a safe return through Earth's atmosphere.
At around 7:10 p.m., Columbia entered the atmosphere, but superheated air began rushing through the damaged area in the wing. The unbearable heat caused the astronauts to lose consciousness, and the shuttle's systems gradually failed. Within minutes, around 7:30 p.m., Columbia broke apart in a fiery explosion and fell over Texas like a shower of meteors. Although STS-107 did not end successfully, Kalpana Chawla and her crewmates earned lasting honor. Their sudden deaths were heartbreaking, but their sacrifice was not in vain.
Honors
She was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
Several roads, universities, institutions, and scholarships were named in Kalpana Chawla's honor. One of the seven peaks in the Columbia Hills was also named after her.
According to her last wish, her cremated remains were scattered in Zion National Park in Utah.
NASA dedicated a supercomputer to Kalpana Chawla.