AEROSPACE ENGINEER
ASTRONAUT
INDIA
USA
1962 → 2003
DOCTOR
ASTRONAUT
USA
1961 → 2003
THE COLUMBIA ACCIDENT
Kalpana Chawla grew up in India. She used to watch the planes at a local flying club, and hoped one day to become an aerospace engineer. She followed her dreams to the United States, where she got a job at NASA researching the behavior of airflow on aircraft. Laurel Clark was a Navy doctor. She had been trained for all sorts of challenging environments, carrying out medical evacuations from submarines, and working with aircraft as a flight surgeon.
Laurel and Kalpana were both selected by NASA as astronauts and were members of the crew of STS-107 on board the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was Laurel’s first flight to space and Kalpana’s second.
Columbia lifted off on January 16, 2003. Just eighty-two seconds after launch a piece of foam insulation separated from the external fuel tank and hit the wing. Teams on the ground spotted this, but similar events had happened before, so the program managers believed the damage was minor and would not cause Columbia any problems, and reassured the crew that all was in order.
Kalpana, Laurel and their five crewmates, Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, William McCool, Ilan Ramon and David Brown, had a really busy mission. They spent sixteen days in orbit, working in shifts to carry out experiments twenty-four hours a day. Among them, Laurel observed roses bloom and silkworms hatch. Kalpana helped fix an experiment looking at how water mist might stop a fire in microgravity.
On February 1, Columbia fired its main engines and headed home after a successful mission. As the Shuttle reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, hot gases rushed into a hole in the wing where the foam had hit on launch. Mission control started seeing some strange readings in their data, and then lost communication with the Shuttle. A few minutes later they heard reports of multiple streaks of light over Texas, where Columbia should have been flying through the atmosphere. Columbia had been torn apart by the hot gases rushing into the wing, ultimately causing a catastrophic loss of control and the disintegration of the vehicle, killing all the crew.
Once more NASA and the space community had to confront the dangers of spaceflight. All of the Shuttles were grounded while the accident was investigated. NASA decided to retire the Space Shuttle once it had finished building the International Space Station and then focus on developing safer spacecraft. Laurel, Kalpana and the crew’s mission ended in tragedy, but it was not in vain. Their experiments led to advancements in many areas of science, including helping to improve cancer drugs, and their research will live on, keeping their memory alive.
“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.” KALPANA CHAWLA
“There was a moth [in one of the silkworm cocoons] . . . just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places and life is a magical thing.” LAUREL CLARK