The first Indian-origin woman to fly in space. Born in Karnal, Haryana, in 1962; degrees from Punjab Engineering College, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Colorado Boulder. Selected by NASA in 1994. First flew on STS-87 in 1997. On her second mission, STS-107 in February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry over Texas, killing the seven-member crew. She was forty. The schools, scholarships, satellites and streets named for her since are not the point. The point — the part that matters when you talk to a Karnal girl in 2026 who wants to be an engineer — is that the route from a Haryana classroom to the orbital flight deck has, since Kalpana Chawla, been a route that exists.