Today marks 18 years since the unfortunate day when Kalpana Chawla met her end. The Indian-American astronaut was the first woman to ever go to space. However, just minutes before re-entering into the Earth’s atmosphere, the spaceship that carried her and seven other astronauts disintegrated, leading to the death of all the people on board.

It was a day of mourning 18 years back, and today too, the pain is felt in the absence of the first-ever woman to go to space and the other astronauts who lost their lives on that day.

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Born in 1962, Kalpana Chawla was 20 years old when she moved to the United States from Haryana to obtain a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Before that, she had done her graduation from Punjab Engineering University, in India. In 1988, she started working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA), the space agency of the US.

Later, in 1994, she was chosen by NASA to be a part of the 15th Group of Astronauts. Finally, it was in 1996, that she was chosen to be the mission specialist on the spaceship STS-87. Later in 2003, she was also a part of the mission on the STS-107 space shuttle mission. In that 16-day mission, 80 experiments were conducted by the on-board astronauts.

Only 16 minutes before their spaceship was scheduled to land back on Earth, the disaster happened, killing all the astronauts. Kalpana Chawla remained the only woman to go to space until 2006 when Sunita William not only went to space but also recorded the most spacewalk for a woman.

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Today, although Kalpana Chawla is not there with us anymore, the idea of her excellent achievement stays with us, continuing to encourage young people from developing countries to work towards their passion.