Five years ago, Shuttle mission STS-107 was lost over the skies of Texas. I remember that morning clear as day. I've got a memoriam post at my geekblog for the mission as a whole, but I wanted to also make special note here of Indian astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who also perished aboard Columbia as a member of the crew and India's first female in space.
Wikipedia notes that Kalpana in Sanskrit means "imagination of the mind" and thus also "creation".
Aziz,
ReplyDeleteShe and others deserved to be remembered.
Kalpana was born in India, and was once an Indian citizen. She came from a small village in India
When she flew shuttle for NASA, she had become a naturalized American.
The first Indian in space was Rakesh Sharma.