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Journalism of Courage
On a Thursday last November, Space Shuttle Columbia rocketed off it’s launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, carrying Indian-born Kalpana Chawla as one of it’s crew. Chawla, now a US citizen, is married to an American national and was selected to fly the shuttle as a NASA astronaut.
That’s a bit of a damper, but India can still take pride in the fact that Kalpana is the first person of Indian birth to fly in a US shuttle, and the first Indian woman to go into space as well. It was a matter of pride for her too. She came from a background where space flight was a distant dream."Forget about space, I did not even know if my folks would allow me to go to an engineering college," she said in an interview.
Likewise, the first Indian to set foot in space shuttle Columbia in 1979 had never thought that one day, another Indian would fly in it. At that point of time, it had looked like nothing could go right.
The idea of sending up an Indian on Columbia dates back to 1984, when it was decided thatINSAT-1C would be launched by the shuttle in 1986. NASA proposed to fly an Indian out as well. Out of hundreds of volunteers, two scientists, N C Bhat from the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore and BRadhakrishnan from the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center in Trivandrum were selected to undergo training.
Other than overseeing the launch of the INSAT-1C satellite, one of the payload specialist was to conduct three other experiments. He would carry Indian food up there, photograph the earth and do some yoga experiments in space.
They completed the Indian part of their training and also their stint at Ford Aerospace in California, where INSAT-1C was being built. They were scheduled to fly to Marshal Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, to undergo in-flight training. Then things went wrong.
Challenger exploded during a launch in January 1986, killing all six crew members. The disaster threw the NASA shuttle program out of kilter and India could not delay the launch of its satellite. INSAT-1Cwas shifted out to an European carrier. The Indian scientists sent for training did not fly on any subsequent shuttle mission.
Our association with the shuttle goes back to the times when scientific experiments were being planned for shuttle missions. An Indian cosmic ray experiment was selected by NASA for the fourth shuttle flight, carrying Space Lab-1. The Indian Space Research Organization coordinated and managed the project.
An Investigators’ Working Group Meeting took place at MSFC, Huntsville, Alabama in 1979. There was a total of 14 experiments, nine of them out in the open, exposed to space conditions, on Space Lab. Other than two from India and Japan, all were from Europe and America. Once the meetings were over, on the fourth day, we were taken to visit the MSFC facilities and to have a look at Columbia. I was eager to see the platform where the Indian experiment Anuradha was to be deployed in the open and receive heavy cosmic particles from deep space.
We went outin pairs to board Columbia. There was another Indian with us. Professor R C Lal from A & M University, Alabama, had an experiment about growing large and pure crystals in space riding on Columbia. Naturally, we boarded together. At the access ladder, I beckoned Professor Lal, who was my senior, to precede me. But he stepped back and said: "Pehle aap." The NASA guide joined in as we laughed at the sudden intrusion of the old world in that hitech setting. I followed the guide with Lal trailing behind me.And thus I became the first Indian to set foot in the space shuttle, thanks to a small gesture on the part of another Indian.
