Growing up in the small town of Karnal in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla would spend evenings with her father, watching planes at the local flying club, asking endless questions about how something so heavy could leave the ground. In a place and time where girls were rarely encouraged toward engineering, she decided that's exactly what she wanted to study.
She pursued aeronautical engineering in India, then moved to the United States for further studies, eventually earning a doctorate and joining NASA — becoming the first woman of Indian origin to fly into space, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997.
She spoke often about how ordinary her ambition had felt to her as a child — she simply followed the question that interested her, refusing to accept that the sky, or space beyond it, wasn't meant for someone from a small Indian town.
In 2003, on her second mission, the Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, and Chawla was lost along with her six crewmates. She remains a defining example for generations of Indian students, especially young women in STEM, that where you're from has no bearing on how far you can actually travel.