The first India-born woman to enter space, the late Kalpana Chawla would have celebrated her 59th birthday on Wednesday. She was a part of space flight STS-87 which successfully orbited the Earth in 1999 and was also part of space flight STS-107 in 2003. The flight, however, disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and killed Chawla and the six other crew members.

Following the incident, Chawla has been honoured and served with several  accolades throughout the world. Following her death, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was the then prime minister, had announced that India’s meteorological series of satellites, METSAT, will be named after her and subsequently,  METSAT-1 was renamed  KALPANA-1.

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In 2010, the alumni of the International Space University founded the Kalpana Chawla ISU Scholarship fund to support Indian women’s participation in international space education programs.

The University of Colorado gives the Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Alumni Award, which is named after her. In 2007, the Haryana government had  established the Kalpana Chawla Planetarium in Kurukshetra.

More recently, Northrop Grumman, an American global aerospace and defence technology company, had announced in September 2020 that it would name its Cygnus capsule ‘SS Kalpana Chawla‘ in her memory, according to PTI. 

While making the announcement, the company tweeted, “Today we honour Kalpana Chawla, who made history at @NASA as the first female astronaut of Indian descent. Her contributions to human spaceflight have had a lasting impact.”