Page 90 - English Class 05

pilot, Kalpana began to consider another challenge…. applying to NASA’s space shuttle

program. She was first hired as a research scientist at NASA. In 1994, she was selected
by NASA for training as an astronaut.

When asked what it was like being a woman in her field, she replied, “I really

never, ever thought, while pursuing my studies or doing anything else that I was a
woman or a person from a small city or a different country. I pretty much had my
dreams like anyone else and I followed them. And people who were around me,

fortunately, always encouraged me and said, “If that’s what you want to do, carry on.”

Kalpana’s first space mission in the space shuttle - Columbia was 15 days 16 hours
and 34 minutes long. During this time, she went around the earth 252 times travelling

10.45 million kilometres! The crew included Japanese and a Ukrainian astronauts. The
crew perfor-med experiments such as pollinating plants to observe food growth in
space and tests for making stronger metals and faster computer chips — all for a price

tag of about 56 million dollars.

On Saturday night, when the news about the Columbia disaster broke, there was
shock and disbelief . The town of Karnal spent a sleepless night as thousands of

households stayed glued to their television sets in the hope that Kalpana and the crew
had somehow survived. A journalist wrote…She was a heroine. It takes enormous
ability to become an astronaut. You need to know a lot about everything from biology

to astrophysics to aeronautical engineering. In this age
disbelief : refusal to accept that
something is true of super-specialization, you must have encyclopedic
enormous : great in amount

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