By Philip Chien

Kalpana Chawla lived to fly.

Kalpana Chawla, one of the seven astronauts killed in the Columbia accident on Feb 1, was often mistaken in her birthland as an Indian astronaut.
Chawla's reaction? "It's understandable. I was born there, I grew up there for 20 years. If some people feel possession as a result of that, it is not anything unexpected."
She added that before her first mission, "I think for a lot of people there's confusion. My mom says people call and say can we talk to Kalpana please, they thought I was in New Delhi." Chawla, 41, grew up in Karnal, India, fairly close to the border with Pakistan. She recalled: "The time I was India we didn't have riots in the areas we lived. Even though we lived very, very close to Pakistan, only 140 miles from the border. There are some pockets in India where these things happen, where the two sides are brewing. When I was growing up, I do remember the 1972 war, the times during the two wars when I was there. Going in the ditches, which were not far from our house any time the siren went off. Until it was clear the warplanes were gone and could not spot the city, because we were so close to the border. Those were, when you look at history, very short wars. The other good thing, if anything good can be said about war, was things were decided and then you were normal again."
Even as a teenager Chawla knew that she wanted to become a flight engineer and pursue aircraft design. As a PhD scientist at the University of Colorado, she worked with software on supercomputers, which simulates the airflow over a shuttle's wing.

Chawla came to the United States to study aeronautics and became a U.S. citizen. She worked for NASA's Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley before she was selected as an astronaut in 1994.
Chawla's first spaceflight was the STS-87 mission in 1997.
Before that launch, Chawla said, "I never thought while pursuing my studies or doing anything else about being a woman, or a person from a small city, or a different country. I pretty much had my dreams, like anybody else and I followed them. People around me fortunately always encouraged and said 'if that's what you want to do carry on.'"
NASA permits astronauts to take some souvenirs for their family and close friends. Most astronauts carry items from their hometowns or schools and Chawla was no exception. On her first flight, she said "I'm taking items from my high school [Tagore School in Karnal India], a T-shirt with the school logo and the college logo from the engineering college [Punjab Engineering College]" In addition she carried pendants and small pieces of jewelry for her family and close friends including an early photo of her with her husband. During the latest flight, she carried a while silk banner depicting a teacher blessing a child for the National Science Center in New Delhi.
On her first flight Chawla was responsible for operating the shuttle's robot arm. She was supposed to use the arm to lift a freeflying satellite out of the shuttle's cargo bay and set it free. The crew used a laptop computer to send a series of commands to check out and start the Spartan satellite. But they left out a critical step so when Chawla released the satellite with the robot arm it didn't start up. She moved the arm back in to grab the satellite, but ended up sending the satellite into an unplanned spin. Eventually, two astronauts had to take a spacewalk to retrieve the satellite manually and put it back into the shuttle's cargo bay.

What was Chawla's reaction when she found out what happened? "We had figured out very early on, that's probably what happened. We also knew that in software there's no insight." The failure investigation board also noted that there was no way for the astronaut to realize that the software had no function to warn that the satellite wasn't ready to launch. The software was corrected before the satellite flew again.
Chawla said "Something like that you don't forget. Even though people who looked at [the software] said, before the next flight you should definitely make those changes. So even though they came up with a lot of recommendations, you always feel eternally guilty. I think you can live ten lifetimes after that and still feel the burden of something like that."
Did she think that incident could hurt her career? "I think for me my attitude is not to think about something like that, just keep on training to do your best. And whatever happens, happens."

In July 2000, Chawla was assigned to the STS-107 mission. At that point, the launch was scheduled for June 2001, just 11 months away. But many unrelated technical delays including wiring issues with the shuttle Columbia, delays to an X-ray telescope mission, the decision to give higher priority to a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope and to two missions to the International Space Station, and tiny cracks in the shuttle's plumbing system, resulted in many delays to the mission to Jan 16, 2003.
Like other Americans, Chawla was deeply affected by the 9-11 terrorist attacks. She and fellow astronaut Laurel Clark were at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) a giant swimming pool used to simulate weightless conditions during spacewalks. Chawla and Clark were putting on SCUBA gear.
Chawla recalled, "We heard the news from somebody on the sidelines. We had not gone down yet. I went down to do my checks. When I surfaced, I heard the guy saying there's been an accident with the World Trade Center and an aircraft had hit. My first immediate impression is something is going on in Washington State, because they have the World Trade Conference there. They do some test flying out of the Boeing field and something happened. But when we came back, it was on the television and it was really clear. It was shocking, it made us speechless. We had not gotten out when they announced that they were shutting down the facility and NASA was going to shut down. It was just very hard to believe what had happened. The rest of day it was just eerie not to see any aircraft in the skies."

As an Indian American did Chawla encounter any prejudice after 9-11? She said, "I haven't encountered anything personally, although I do know people who talk about it. I guess Houston, the area we live, is culturally very diverse, so I wouldn't expect such a thing there. People I know people who did experience it were in small towns, suburbia."

On the STS-107 mission Chawla was the flight engineer. She sat on the flight deck for the launch and landing, assisting commander Rick Husband and pilot Willie McCool. During orbit she was responsible for operating many of the scientific experiments. But unlike other members of the crew, Husband, McCool and Chawla were exempt from donating blood and other invasive medical experiments. NASA's rules prohibit pilots and flight engineer from participating in such experiments, because they may be called upon to undertake emergency reentry or other critical task and a blood draw could render them light headed.

Chawla leaves behind her husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison, a freelance flying instructor who taught her how to fly.
Prior to her mission, Chawla talked about the relationship between her family and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon's family. She said, "We were going to go see a a rock concert together, his family and me and my husband." Deep Purple. But it turned out that Chawla and Ramon had to fly to Florida for some training with the shuttle.
She explained, "My husband and his wife went so we've got a lot of funny stories about them meeting the band backstage. I don't think [Ramon] was a fan. But his wife became a fan coming back from the concert - wow this thing is so energetic."
The other members of Chawla's crew were mission specialists Dave Brown and Mike Anderson. Chawla, Husband, Clark and Ramon were the "red shift" for the around-the-clock science operations during the two week flight. Their timetable called for them to be awake with fairly normal daytime schedule, while the "blue shift" of McCool, Brown, and Anderson worked the "night shift."
Chawla had the most poetic description for what she saw in space as she watched her own reflection in one of the shuttle's windows, along with the Earth. She observed, "In the retina of my eye, the whole Earth and the sky could be seen reflected, so I called all the crew members one by one, and they saw it, and everybody said, 'Oh, wow!' "
As a Hindu and a life-long vegetarian, Chawla was ambivalent about the 16 rats that flew on the mission, with plans to sacrifice the rats shortly after the shuttle returned to Earth.
She said, "From my point of view I know the benefits of that research. I personally have thought about experiments like that when we used animals, basically the thought process that goes behind studies like that and the justifications the researchers have. I never try to get too involved and trust the people who are doing it, because you can't take it really personally. When your sibling or parent needs the results of research like that then you are obviously going to say 'yes this is a good idea.' The bottom line ends up being making sure the people who are doing such research are putting the right thought process into the procedures and making sure the best comes out of it and nothing's wasted."
It is likely how she felt about the risks to her own safety on these missions as well.

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