Kalpana : A flight of Desire

“The planet below you is our campsite, and we know of no other campground” said Kalpana while talking to a fellow astronaut. The only campsite they knew was planet Earth and even that eluded them when they tried to re inter its protective and caring arms.
It was not just another worst moment of science. It was the end of 7 individual stories as well and one of them was Kalpana Chawla. The girl from Karnal, Haryana, who dreamed high and one day reached there, but didn’t return home. What we have today with us is a compelling saga of aspiration and adventure, of pure heroism. Someone called Kalpana spreads her wings and flies away to play with the stars and disappears in a shooting glow in the sky. She hasn’t, she has become just another star.

It is not surprising that her mother had been hoping for a boy, being living in a country obsessed with male child. But came out Kalpana who achieved more than a boy could. She was born on 17th March 1962. She decided to be a space engineer by the time she was 14 and was the only girl to study aeronautics at Punjab Engineering College. Still, idea of going to USA was a shock to the traditional family, and they agreed only when her brother went with her to settle her in. she became an astronaut in 1994 and flew with her first shuttle mission in 1997. She could not get over the marvel of it and readily agreed for her second mission when any astronaut who has gone to space once is not keen to enter it again, as by this time, they are fully aware of the hazards involved in space flights. She was even ready to join the team going to the Mars whose return was not guaranteed.

Any risk much repeated can become routine, and so is for shuttle flights, except when they become tragic. Thats when we are reminded that knowledge doesn’t come easy and that many consequences are unintended, especially when we set off on an adventure. Its strange that we glimpse the impossible only when it fails. How can this space craft exist, one that leaves the earth like a ballistic missile, a fragile plane strapped to half a million gallons of explosive fuel, but two weeks later returns as a glider, swooping in wide S turns back to earth under nature’s power alone ? Columbia was the 88th mission since the challenger was lost in January 1986 – one flight lost to cold, one to the heat.

The life and deeds of Montu, Kalpana’s nickname, is a way for the whole India to follow. A girl born in a small Indian town went up to fulfill her dreams and came out with flying colours. Kalpana’s study started in her hometown karnal itself in Tagore Baal Niketan. She completed her Pre-University from DAV College for women and Pre-Engineering from Dyal Singh College, Karnal. She later moved to Chandigarh to complete BSc in aeronautical engineering from PEC in 1982. She then shifted to US where she married a French national named Jean Pierre Harrison who was her flight instructor in a pilot training institute in 1983. She completed her MS in aerospace engineering from university of Texas and PhD in aerospace engineering from University of Colorado in 1988. She was selected by NASA as an astronaut in 1994 and had her first flight mission in 1994 and again in ill fated 2003 which was to be her last.

Some of the famous sayings of Kalpana are:
Follow your dreams
The path from dreams to reality does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get onto it and the perseverance to follow it?
The quickest way may not necessarily be the best.
Pioneers don’t have role models.

Her last day in space began with ‘Scotland the brave’ piped over radio. “Wild are the winds to meet you. Staunch are the friends that greet you, kind as the love that shines from fair maidens’ eyes “.people watching in eastern Texas heard a crushing rumble outside and a rain of shuttle pieces fell onto backyards, roadsides & parking lots. It felt like an attack on the calm of watchful winter, in this case no apparent evil, no enemy other than the limits of man and machines and tension between the goals we set and the risks we take. Just in few seconds a promising career and a great story came to an end. Kalpana who always wanted to live with stars became a resident of Milky Way. I would conclude with these very words:

“What she did is past, what she would have done, would have been the present, but what she showed is the way.”