Belt's On? We're About To Take Off

WHILE NASA, SPACEX AND TEAM INDUS, AMONG OTHER GIANTS, PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF SPACE EXPLORATION, IT’S WORTH ASKING WHAT’S IN IT FOR US?

- Issac John

I never knew Kalpana Chawla. But on the night of February 1, 2003 when news of Space Shuttle Columbia falling apart struck our TV screens, with her picture in an orange spacesuit as the prominent thumbnail, I remembered thinking what her family must’ve gone through that night. That morning, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, she and her crew were expected to safely land at 09:16 hours EST. About ten minutes before the scheduled landing, at 09:05 hours, residents of north central Texas, reported seeing smoke trails and debris from the skies above.

I was in my final year of college back then and while I had very little by way of information about her before that catastrophe, for the next few weeks, I absorbed every bit of news that came my way about her.

Among her other illustrious set of achievements, I learnt that she was a girl from Karnal, who did her aeronautical engineering from Punjab and she carried pins from her school and college from India on that ill-fated trip. A small part of me also felt that if a girl from Karnal could go on her second space mission with NASA, perhaps I hadn’t done too bad with schooling from Ghaziabad and a bachelor’s degree from Kerala University. It was, at best a fleeting selfish thought.

The enormity of her accomplishment, despite that tragic ending, only dawned on me when I joined my younger sister’s opening day in school in a small town in Kerala, called Punalur two months later. (Don’t bother, you won’t find Punalur on most maps they sell in stationery shops or they have on Google.)