A dimunitive woman, ensconced in a bulky, orange-hued space suit, flashing a brilliant smile and waving enthusiastically to the world as she made her way into the Columbia space shuttle along with six others minutes before blast-off. That was Kalpana Chawla on January 19. As it turned out, that was to be the last image we have of her on terra firma. A valedictory frame for posterity which captured a rare spirit and a rarer trajectory. Here was a woman, emerging from a small town, who went on to become the first India-born woman astronaut. Here was a spacewalker in every sense of the term: transcending location to reach for the skies and beyond. Therefore, in a sense, death can never gain dominion over such a life.Imagine, for a moment, the effort that went into Kalpana’s journey. Born in a region not generally known to value its women or encourage them to dream big, or indeed consider a life outside of marriage, she went on to study engineering. Not at a fancy institution like an IIT, please note, but at the Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, one among the seven girls of her batch, and the only one in its aerospace engineering department. Many who applaud Kalpana’s achievements fail to realise the rigorous academic work that went into making her career, right from early work in fluid dynamics at Ames to a doctorate from the University of Colorado. Clearly, USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration knew what it was about when it selected her to be an astronaut in 1994 and went on to put her on board its space shuttle flight STS-87 three years later. That she was chosen yet again, for its star-crossed STS-107 mission, is acknowledgement of the key role she had come to play in conducting scientific experiments on board the shuttle, some 277 km from Planet Earth.This indeed is a saga that will inspire every school child and every little girl who has a dream to fly. By keeping in touch with her old school in Karnal, enabling students to come over to NASA on study trips, carrying mementoes from the institutions that shaped her on her space odysseys, Kalpana was only recognising her role as an icon for India’s youth. To them, she was ‘Kalpana Didi’, who showed them yet another way to achieve fame. Even as we mourn her tragic death, therefore, we must also celebrate a very special life. Perhaps a good way to do this is to rescue science education in this country from the abysmal levels its has fallen. And then, who knows, some day soon there could be another Kalpana Chawla, in a spacesuit, waiting to blast off.
