Asian Woman Seeking Water and Wit (Feature) First Indian American, APA Woman Astronaut Mourned Globally (in National News) Taking a Stand (in Bay Area News) Going Out with Style (in Sports) Capturing the Stuff of Dreams (in A&E) Emil Amok: Space Immigrant (in Opinion)

First Indian American, APA Woman Astronaut Mourned Globally

By AsianWeek Staff and Associated Press

Kalpana Chawla aboard the shuttle Columbia.

“Since she was with NASA, there were all kinds of things that we had to go through to be cleared before she could come speak,” Rao said. “But once it was cleared, she was so enthusiastic, she even called me ahead of time to discuss her presentation.”

Rao said that Chawla was a huge hit with the audience of some 300 at the Louis Meyer Center, located on the campus of Santa Clara University.

“She was so easy-going. She stayed after her presentation and answered questions and signed autographs for over an hour,” Rao said. “It’s just so sad.”

Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon (left), Mission Specialist Laurel Clark, Shuttle Commander Rick Husband and Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, speak with Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from the space shuttle Columbia.

The Columbia, the oldest shuttle in the U.S. fleet, was streaking through the sky at 12,500 mph when it burst into flames at about 9 a.m., shortly after reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The crew, six Americans and the first Israeli astronaut, was scheduled to land in Florida about 15 minutes later.

“America’s space program will go on,” President Bush declared in an outdoor ceremony mourning the seven Columbia astronauts, on Feb. 4.

About Chawla, Bush said: “She left India as a student, but she would see the nation of her birth, all of it, from hundreds of miles above.”

Small Village to Outer Space

When Chawla left home more than 20 years ago, small-town India expected its young women to get married, have babies and settle into lives dictated by generations of tradition.

But Chawla, the youngest daughter in a wealthy factory-owning family, chose another path. Her ambitions took her from her hometown in northern India to a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, to a life in Texas — and finally to the weightlessness of space.

In Karnal, a drab industrial town where cars jockey for space on pitted asphalt streets with buffalo carts and bicycle rickshaws, Chawla had long been a hero. Under a chilly, steel-gray sky on Sunday, she was mourned like one.

Dozens of people stopped by her childhood home, and hundreds gathered at her high school, Tagore Baal Niketan, to pray at a makeshift shrine. In the Hindu tradition, incense burned in front of her photograph, which was draped in garlands of marigolds.

Chawla’s 1997 space flight, the first by an Indian-born woman, had made her a powerful symbol of achievement.

Part tomboy who cut her own hair and part shy bookworm, Chawla dismayed her family as a teenager by announcing she wanted to study aeronautical engineering at Punjab University, some 100 miles from home. The resistance was intense.

“Only because I was a girl, people gave a hard time to my mother because she sent me to school in another town,” Chawla said in a 1998 interview with News-India Times. “How would you feel if people don’t approve of what you are doing or your mother is doing for you?”

Later, she went much further from home, earning an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas and a doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Chawla’s professional career prior to joining NASA was grounded in research. In 1988, she was hired by MCAT Institute in San Jose, Calif., where she was responsible for simulation and analysis of flow physics pertaining to the operation of powered-lift aircrafts.

In 1993, she joined Overset Methods Inc., as vice president and research scientist, where she was responsible for the development of techniques to perform aerodynamic optimization.

A woman from a generation and culture where arranged marriages were the norm, Chawla married an American flight instructor, Jean-Pierre Harrison. In a time when many Indian women still mark their lives by the number of sons they’ve had, Chawla and Harrison had no children.

A Challenging Journey

On Chawla’s first space mission, back in 1997, she ran into some trouble.

The mission, which spanned 6.5 million miles, entailed the deployment and retrieval of the Spartan satellite, a space walk and a series of scientific experiments.

Chawla was assigned the critical task of deploying and retrieving the Spartan satellite — a goal ultimately unfulfilled — which brought the mission some notoriety.

As Chawla recounted, the trouble began two days after Columbia blasted off, when she set the Spartan satellite loose to record data from the sun’s outer atmosphere. Shortly after releasing Spartan, the unit malfunctioned, and while Chawla attempted to recover the satellite using a robotic arm, she unintentionally bumped it and set it into an uncontrollable spin.

The good news was that the $10 million satellite was recovered in a daring space walk rescue by two of Chawla’s colleagues. The bad news was that once the satellite was recovered, it was retired for the remainder of the flight, its data recorder remaining empty.

Chawla took this mishap in stride and said she learned from it. As far as the mission goes, Chawla felt fortunate to be among the select few to have been a part of it.

“It was literally out of this world. The idea of working a lab that is in microgravity orbiting the Earth is novel even today,” Chawla told AsianWeek in a 1998 interview.

“The earth views were absolutely magical, and the notion that it takes us just an hour and a half to go around the planet ... once you experience it, it’s mind boggling.”

Chawla was described by friends and family as dedicated but playful. She began sponsoring youth from her village in India to attend space camp. She was also known to be a great music lover.

Rao remembers Chawla talking about her love of Indian classical music when she came to Santa Clara.

“It was great, she talked about playing Ravi Shankar up there in space for her fellow astronauts,” Rao said.

In Sunnyvale. Calif., about 100 people in business suits and saris chanted, sang and burned candles and incense at a local temple to remember Chawla. Similar memorials were held at temples and Indian American community centers across the country.

“These [astronauts] belong to different countries and religions and ethnicities,” said temple director Raj Bhanot. “But they all had one goal, one common mission — to be the best.”