Space

DATE=2-14-2003

TYPE=Special English Feature

NUMBER=7-28502

TITLE=SPECIAL ENGLISH AMERICAN MOSAIC #909-Kalpana Chawla

BYLINE=Nancy Steinbach

TELEPHONE=619-2585

DATELINE=Washington

EDITOR=Shelley Gollust

CONTENT=

HOST:

Our VOA listener question this week comes from India. Sampath asks about Kalpana Chawla, the Indian-born American astronaut who was one of the seven people killed on the space shuttle Columbia.

Kalpana Chawla was responsible for more than twelve scientific experiments on the sixteen-day flight of the Columbia. It was her second trip into space. She first flew on a space shuttle in nineteen-ninety-seven. She described earth as very beautiful, and said she wished everyone could see it as she had.

Kalpana Chawla was born forty-one years ago in Karnal, about one-hundred-thirty kilometers north of New Delhi. Her friends say she always wanted to fly. She moved to the United States in the nineteen-eighties, after graduating from Punjab Engineering College. She continued to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas in Arlington and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She became an astronaut in nineteen-ninety-four.

After Mizz Chawla became an American citizen, she continued to communicate with students at her school in her hometown. Every year, she invited two of them to visit her at the American space agency. Students say she told them to follow their dreams, and that she would help them if their dreams could not come true in India.

Hundreds of students had gathered at the school when the Columbia astronauts were expected to return to Earth. They prayed together when they learned the news that the shuttle had broken apart.

Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian-born woman in space. But she told Indian reporters that she did not feel Indian when flying. She said that looking at the stars made her feel that she was from the solar system, not from one area of land on Earth.

Millions of people in India, the United States and other nations mourned the loss of Kalpana Chawla and the other six Columbia astronauts. President Bush spoke about their lives and their work at a memorial service last week in Texas. He said the American space program would continue so that their scientific work would not be lost.