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Penguin Books Ltd - Anil Padmanabhan

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53 pages

English

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Born into a conservative family in a provincial town in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla dreamt of the stars. And through sheer hard work, indomitable intelligence and immense faith in herself, she became the first Indian woman to travel to space, and even more remarkably, to travel twice. In this well-researched biography, journalist Anil Padmanabhan talks to people who knew her family and friends at Karnal, and colleagues at NASA to produce a moving portrait of a woman whose life was a shining affirmation that if you have a dream, no matter how hard it is, you can achieve it.

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Sciences et techniques

Astronautics

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	05 mai 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184758443
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ANIL PADMANABHAN
Kalpana Chawla
A Life
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
Growing Up in Karnal
Daring to Dream
Following the Dream
The Long Wait
And the Dream Comes True
A Second Chance
Epilogue
Illustrations
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PUFFIN BOOKS
KALPANA CHAWLA
Anil Padmanabhan is the India Today chief of bureau at New York.
This book is dedicated to the memory of the seven astronauts who died aboard Columbia space shuttle on 1 February 2003
Prologue
It is after 5.30 a.m. on board the Columbia space shuttle. On the flight deck, the crew is going through the final drill before the scheduled touchdown forty-five minutes later. The spacecraft, in its twenty-eighth flight, is returning to earth after sixteen days in space. In just a few minutes, Columbia will make its atmospheric entry and begin its glide to Cape Canaveral in Florida. This is the point at which the spacecraft, exposed to intense heat of up to 3000 degrees centigrade, will be at maximum risk.
Unmindful of this, mission specialist Laurel B. Clark takes a video camera and pans it across the flight deck. Mission specialist Kalpana Chawla and the spaceship s pilot, William C. McCool, clad in their orange spacesuits, wave at the camera as they go about stowing their equipment. Colonel Rick Husband, commander of the mission, accidentally brushes the controls with his leg and disengages one of the shuttle s numerous control panels. He doesn t even realize it till the command centre from Houston alerts him. His all-American response of Shoot is met by shrugs all around.
It is still dark outside and the crew is unable to sight the island of Hawaii, lying south-west of the shuttle. It is time for Columbia to start its journey into the atmosphere. The flight deck lights up with a dazzling display of pyrotechnics-a grand moment to mark Columbia s re-entry into the atmosphere of planet Earth. Outside, everything is bathed in a tangerine pink glow. Inside, Clark turns the video upwards through a window in the roof of the shuttle to capture the pyrotechnic display outside. Colonel Husband jokes, Looks like a blast furnace You definitely don t want to be outside now.
Meanwhile, the cables floating freely on the flight deck till now start getting pulled downwards as the earth s gravity starts taking over. Home is less than thirty minutes away. At Cape Canaveral, where Columbia is due to land, it is just past 8.30 a.m. Families of the crew mill around, waiting eagerly for the shuttle to put in an appearance. Up early, having flown into Florida the previous night, they are on their seats by 7 a.m. Somewhere in the milieu, there s the tall, bearded, and long-haired Jean-Pierre Harrison, Kalpana s husband of nineteen years. Kalpana s nieces have braided and beaded his hair for the occasion. It is almost three weeks since Kalpana left on her second mission in space, and he couldn t wait to see her. At their home in Houston, the rest of Kalpana s family-barring her brother-are waiting as eagerly. They have come all the way from India to be with Montu for this historic touchdown.
Elsewhere, many are glued to their television sets. They see the white streak that is the Columbia on their screens-the touchdown is being telecast live. At Mission Control in Houston, at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA staff go over the routine drill preceding a shuttle touchdown. The skies are clear. There are no forecasts of any renegade storms moving up unexpectedly from the Gulf of Mexico. The setting looks perfect. Columbia, travelling at twenty times the speed of sound, is still hovering somewhere in the skies at almost 500,000 feet above sea level. The wait ends and the spacecraft begins its descent, poised to pierce the earth s atmosphere.
More than halfway across the world in Karnal-a bustling town in Haryana, in north India-a mini celebration is being planned. It is just after dusk towards the fag end of winter. About 300 schoolchildren from the Tagore Bal Niketan have gathered to celebrate the return from space of their most illustrious alumni, Kalpana Chawla. For the children-indeed, for the whole of Karnal-this is a special evening.
Stargazers from all over the world have been tracking Columbia s path in its final hours. They are all on the lookout for a glimpse of the white streak across the sky before it heads home. In California, some are fortunate enough to sight the bright glow of the shuttle-still about sixty miles high-as it streaks past. But some of them notice a billowing of the trail, as if Columbia was shedding debris. Odd. Minutes later, there s a loud boom over Texas, rattling windows in the vicinity.
It is just after 9 a.m. at Cape Canaveral. At the Command Center in Houston, the first wave of panic takes over. Colonel Husband s response to their last message from mission control had been aborted midway. All communication with Columbia has been lost. This, however, is routine when a spaceship re-enters the earth s atmosphere. Jean-Pierre-JP to those who know him-too is aware that this is commonplace. However, successive calls go unanswered. At about the two-minute mark, prior to touchdown, JP does not hear the expected double sonic booms of the shuttle overhead.
As minutes pass, the silence becomes deafening. For the first time, the ground crew feel that something has gone wrong. On television screens across the world, the white streak has turned to a series of white spots in the sky. The first fearful questions have begun doing the rounds; phones are ringing all over the world. At the landing site, officials with cellphones glued to their ears are exiting the viewing area. The worst is feared. The world does not have to wait till the official word is out. The television cameras do not lie. Columbia has blown up and its debris is raining down on the southern states of Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.
It is darkness at noon. At the Kennedy Space Center, workers hunch over their terminals in complete shock, while at the same time family members of the crew are being herded together at Cape Canaveral. Shuttle contingency is declared. In the Houston home of Kalpana, her family stares in disbelief at the television screen. Montu won t be coming home. And, in her hometown, the party for the schoolchildren is over. Instead, the stunned inmates of Tagore Bal Niketan join one billion countrymen in mourning their brightest star. An abrupt end to a space journey for six other brave astronauts too.
But in her wake, forty-one-year-old Kalpana leaves behind many unanswered questions. What made it possible for this petite girl from Karnal to successfully undertake such an incredible journey that not only spanned continents but also cultures and finally ended in space? Unlike what many others would have done, Kalpana had chosen to come out of the comfortable cocoon of a well-to-do family, preferring instead to explore the world, taking the challenges as they came. Overcoming a host of prejudices, this five-foot-tall, slightly built girl, armed with only her radiant smile and fierce determination, had managed to realize her dream. Therein lies one of the most compelling stories of our times, one that begins in a house in downtown Karnal in 1961.
Growing Up in Karnal
The town of Karnal lies on the Grand Trunk Road, halfway between New Delhi and Chandigarh. Located along the west bank of the river Yamuna, the town and its adjacent areas have legendary history linked to it, dating back to the Mahabharata. Legend has it that neighbouring Kurukshetra-also in Karnal district-was the battlefield that launched the famous war of Mahabharata between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Centuries later, the town s penchant to be associated with history has not changed.
In 1961, the household of Banarasi Lal Chawla, in Karnal, was expecting the arrival of a baby. By the persistent kicking in the stomach, Sanjyoti, going by midwife tales, felt that it was probably going to be a boy-she already had two daughters and a son. But lo and behold, the fourth member born to Banarasi Lal and Sanjyoti Chawla turned out to be a very energetic baby girl. It wouldn t be the last time that Kalpana would surprise her parents.
The Chawla household had only recently moved to Karnal. Banarasi Lal, like thousands of others in the wake of the Partition riots, had trekked across from Pakistan, with precious little of his own. Only those with grit eventually made it and, more importantly, were able to put the bloodshed behind them and move on with their lives.
For Banarasi Lal, then a teenager, and his family, the first stop after leaving Gujranwala in Pakistan was Ludhiana. As refugees, they had to begin from scratch, and Chawla senior, along with other members of the family, started out on a host of businesses, including selling wares as a street hawker. With each change in occupation, he started nudging up the social ladder. The progress was slow, till the extended family finally moved to Karnal. They took up a two-storeyed house in the middle of the town, close to the family business, which at that time was merchandise in clothes. A little later, the family took to the business of manufacturing tyres, which turned out to be very lucrative.
Through all this, the Chawla household retained its spirituality. Banarasi Lal s parents had abdicated worldly existence and moved into a little kutiya on the outskirts of Karnal town to spend their last years in spartan existence. Religious attitude in the family was secular. While Banarasi Lal himself read the Guru Granth Sahib, wife Sanjyoti was also drawn to the preaching of Pune-based Swami Rajneesh. As far as food was concerned, the household was uniformly vegetarian, a habit Kalpana retained even years later when she went up in space as an astronaut.
The years of struggle were not lost on Montu, as Kalpana came to be affectionately known in family circles. Though by then the family business