All eyes are now on the anticipated return of NASA’s Sunita Williams and her fellow astronaut Barry 'Butch' E. Wilmore to Earth, set to happen about a week from now. For India, this moment holds special significance. After Kalpana Chawla, another astronaut of Indian origin has carved an inspiring legacy in space exploration.
In 1997, Kalpana Chawla fulfilled her lifelong dream and became the first Indian-born woman astronaut to travel to space. A year later, in 1998, Sunita Williams was selected as a NASA astronaut, eventually embarking on multiple space missions, including the recent Boeing Starliner flight on June 5, 2024, which docked at the International Space Station (ISS) the next day.
Despite their different journeys, Chawla and Williams share remarkable parallels — and surprising contrasts.
A Tale Of Two Dreams
Sunita Williams’ father, Dr Deepak Pandya, was a medical scholar from a village in Gujarat who immigrated to the US, where he built a distinguished academic career in neuroanatomy. Meanwhile, Kalpana Chawla’s father, Banarsi Lal Chawla, endured the brutal Partition of India in 1947. Rising from hardship, he became a successful industrialist in Karnal, Haryana.
While Williams was born and raised in Ohio, surrounded by academic and research-driven influences, Chawla’s journey to NASA was a remarkable leap from a small Indian town where even pursuing an engineering degree was considered ambitious for a woman. In a PBS documentary, Chawla reflected on this challenge: “For me, it was very farfetched to think that I’d fly on a space shuttle because I lived in a very small town in India. Forget about space, I didn’t even know if my folks were going to let me go to engineering college.” Yet, she did — earning an aerospace engineering degree from Punjab Engineering College before completing her PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
A Shared Love For Samosas — With One Key Difference
Beyond their spacefaring careers, Williams and Chawla had another common passion: samosas. The beloved Indian snack is a favourite comfort food for Williams, as it was for Chawla.
Sunita Williams made sure to bring samosas aboard the ISS, famously expressing her love for Indian cuisine upon returning from her first space mission in 2006: “Indian food! You can never get enough of Indian food... I had to make sure I had samosas in space with me.” For her Starliner mission, she once again ensured Indian flavours accompanied her.
Kalpana Chawla, however, made a different choice. Though she loved samosas just as much, she decided against taking them to space. Her husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison, author of ‘The Edge of Time: The Authoritative Biography of Kalpana Chawla’, revealed exclusively to this author the factor that drove her decision. “Kalpana did not take samosas into space. She did not want to trouble the nutritionists with determining their calorie value, obtaining, and packaging them,” Harrison said.
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Legacies In The Stars
Tragically, Chawla’s second mission aboard the Columbia space shuttle ended in disaster on February 1, 2003, when the shuttle disintegrated during re-entry, killing the entire crew.
Over two decades later, Sunita Williams continues to push boundaries in the realm of space exploration. After unforeseen spacecraft issues extended their stay on the ISS from the planned 10 days to nine months, Williams and Barry Wilmore are finally set to return to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon on March 19, 2025.
The writer is a senior independent journalist.