Kalpana Chawla

On 21 November 1997, on her first spaceflight, Kalpana Chawla used Space Shuttle Columbia's robotic arm to let go of a research satellite called Spartan, and within minutes it was clear something was wrong.

She was 35. Her path to the arm had started in Karnal, a small town in Haryana. Her father had come to India as a refugee during Partition and supported the family by selling goods on the street before he built a tyre business. When Kalpana chose aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College, she was the only woman in her class. A few years later she was in Texas for a master's degree, then in Colorado for a PhD, and in 1994 NASA picked her as an astronaut. On this mission she was the first Indian-born woman in space, and the people back in Karnal were following every update.

Spartan was meant to fly free for two days, studying the Sun's outer atmosphere, and then be picked up again. It was supposed to start a slow, controlled turn after release. It didn't. It began to drift and tumble. Chawla moved the arm back out to grab it, but the satellite was rotating and the grip missed. The commander called off further attempts so nobody risked hitting the shuttle with a spinning machine.

At first, many news reports pointed to the person on the arm. Two days later, astronauts Winston Scott and Takao Doi went outside and caught Spartan with their gloved hands. Chawla watched from inside, knowing her name was the one attached to the failure.

NASA's review board took months. It found several causes, including software behavior and gaps in procedures and in communication between the crew and the ground. No single person caused the failure. Before the report came out, she had no way of knowing what it would say.

She didn't argue her case in public. She went back to work: more training hours and more time learning how the systems behaved. She treated the tumbling satellite as data about a system she needed to understand better, and she didn't treat it as a ruling on whether she belonged in space.

In 2000, NASA offered her a second mission, STS-107. She said yes and started training the same year.

The lesson: Saying yes to a second flight, after a failure the whole world had watched, was the decision that defined her career more than the satellite she missed.

Try this: Tonight before 9 p.m., write one line naming your most recent public mistake and one fact you learned from it. Then do one small thing tomorrow morning that uses that fact. You're done when the line is written and the action is on your calendar.

Send this to: the colleague still replaying a mistake from last quarter. "Kalpana Chawla lost a satellite on live TV, then asked to fly again. Your move."

Sources

• NASA's official astronaut biography of Kalpana Chawla, covering her education, selection and spaceflights: https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chawla.html
• NASA's STS-87 mission page, describing the Spartan deployment and the spacewalk to recover it: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/sts-87/
• Encyclopaedia Britannica's independent biography, covering her early life in Karnal and her career at NASA: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kalpana-Chawla

This is a dramatized editorial narrative created for personal inspiration, drawn from publicly available sources listed above. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the person or their estate.