down across East Texas and Louisiana. Columbia has disintegrated at 200,000 feet traveling 12,500 miles per hour. All seven astronauts are killed instantly, including Kalpana Chawla—the first woman of Indian descent to fly in space, the girl from a small Indian town who looked up at the stars and decided nothing would stop her from reaching them.But to understand why Kalpana’s story matters, you have to go back to where it began. Karnal, India. 1962.Kalpana Chawla was born on March 17, 1962, in a small town in Haryana, India—the youngest of four children. Her father ran a tire business. Her mother was a homemaker.In 1960s India, especially in small towns, girls had predetermined paths: get educated enough to be marriageable, then become wives and mothers. Engineering? Science? Space exploration? Those weren’t for girls.But Kalpana’s father saw something different in his youngest daughter. When she expressed fascination with airplanes, he didn’t discourage her. When she wanted to study engineering, he supported her—even though relatives warned him he was ruining her marriage prospects .Kalpana enrolled in Punjab Engineering College, one of the few women in her class. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1982—already an extraordinary achievement for a young Indian woman.But Kalpana wasn’t satisfied. India’s aerospace industry in the 1980s offered limited opportunities, especially for women. She wanted more. She wanted America. She wanted to fly.In 1982, at age 20, Kalpana moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies. She enrolled at the University of Texas at Arlington, earning her Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1984.Then she went to the University of Colorado Boulder for her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, which she completed in 1988.Think about what that means. A young woman from a small Indian town, navigating American graduate programs in the 1980s—often one of the only women, certainly one of the only Indians, in advanced aerospace engineering courses. The cultural adjustment. The academic pressure. The subtle (and not-so-subtle) discrimination. Kalpana pushed through all of it.After her Ph.D., she worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, researching vertical takeoff and landing concepts. She earned her pilot’s license. She married Jean-Pierre Harrison, a flight instructor. She became a U.S. citizen. And she applied to NASA’s
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