Sixty years in the past, the Indian space programme was born.
On the night of November 21, 1963, a 715-kg Nike Apache rocket soared from a small launch pad on the beach-head at Thumba, a fishing village on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram. It rose 208 km into the sky and launched a sodium vapour payload, portray the twilight sky with a big, vibrant orange cloud.
The Nike Apache rocket is readied for launch.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives
The Kerala Assembly was in session on the time in Thiruvananthapuram. Its members ran out to see the spectacle within the sky. They have been entranced. The sight fascinated hundreds of individuals within the space. Some of them later stated that the launch hooked them to rocketry and motivated them to be part of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
The Nike Apache launch was a world effort underneath the United Nations. The rocket got here from the U.S., the sodium vapour payload from France, and the vary clearance from an MI-4 helicopter from the then Soviet Union. The rocket and payload engineers have been Indians.
The rocket had been mated with the payload in St. Mary Magdalene Church, Thumba, which had been taken over by the nationwide authorities. The parish priest’s home served because the mission management centre.
Vikram Sarabhai was current throughout the launch, as have been E.V. Chitnis, P.D. Bhavsar, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, and the French payload specialist Jacques Blamont, amongst others.
Vikram Sarabhai (dealing with the digicam, the center) and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (excessive proper, face partially seen) close to the Nike Apache rocket, whose nostril cone is seen on the launch pad, earlier than its launch on November 21, 1963. Photo: ISRO
India launched its first actually indigenous rocket on February 22, 1969. Vasant Gowariker, who later grew to become the Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thumba, stated it was “a pencil-sized rocket”. He advised this author in 1980 that it carried just a few kilograms of stable propellants and rose just a few kilometres into the air.
ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Director B.N Suresh and French payload specialist Jacques Blamont throughout the fortieth anniversary celebrations of Indian rocketry on the VSSC in Thiruvananthapuram on November 21, 2003.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu
On November 21, 2003, ISRO celebrated 40 years of Indian rocketry on the VSSC. Dr. Blamont was current as the numerous attendees, together with Dr. Gowariker, R. Aravamudan, and G. Madhavan Nair competed to pay beneficiant tributes to Sarabhai. They praised his “charisma” and “magnetic personality”, and counseled his knack of attracting good expertise to ISRO.
The Nike Apache rocket on the launcher at Thumba.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives
Abdul Kalam, who had change into the nation’s President in 2002, addressed ISRO engineers from Rashtrapati Bhavan. He started his speech with a countdown that elicited thunderous applause. “I was a payload fellow” throughout the Nike Apache mission, he stated, to extra cheer.
A brand new period
On July 18, 1980, India grew to become a part of a choose membership of countries when its home-grown Satellite Launch Vehicle-3 (SLV-3), weighing 17 tonnes, positioned the 35-kg Rohini satellite tv for pc into orbit. The solely different international locations with the power to put their satellites into orbit utilizing their very own launch autos have been the Soviet Union, the U.S., the U.Ok., and France.
A stamp with footage of the Satellite Launch Vehicle-3 rocket and the Rohini satellite tv for pc.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives
The SLV-3s have been adopted by the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicles (ASLVs), the Polar Satellite Vehicles (PSLVs), and the Geo-stationary Satellite Launch Vehicles (GSLVs). The PSLVs and its variants have after all change into ISRO’s trusted workhorse. India additionally has quite a lot of sounding rockets to research the higher ambiance.
ISRO has had its share of failures – together with its first SLV-3 flight in 1979, its first two ASLV flights, the primary PSLV mission, and some GSLV missions. The organisation has had hassle accepting the destiny of those missions as such, preferring to name them “partial successes”. But to its credit score, it has additionally finally vaulted to full successes.
Today, India is an influential spacefaring nation. On July 14, 2023, in its M-4 mission, a Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (LVM-3) weighing 640 tonnes lifted off from the second launch pad at Sriharikota and positioned the four-tonne Chandrayaan-3 composite module into an orbit across the earth.
On August 23, 2023, the Chandrayaan-3 lander, named ‘Vikram’, soft-landed on the moon, and some hours later, a rover named ‘Pragyaan’ rolled out onto the lunar floor. The success made a brand new form of historical past for India.
ISRO Chairman S. Somanath known as the feat “the beginning of a golden era” and stated Chandrayaan-3 was a “made in India craft”. In his evaluation, the mission’s “most critical event” was the launch of the LVM-3 rocket itself, because it was utterly autonomous.
On the power of its rockets, India has been in a position to construct and launch satellites for quite a lot of functions, together with remote-sensing, weather-forecasting, communications, navigation, surveillance, tele-education, cartography, prospecting assets, and many others. It has additionally launched into deep-space science missions to research the moon, Mars, the Sun, and distant stars.
“India has assured access to space,” within the phrases of the late S. Ramakrishnan, a reputed rocket technologist and former Director of VSSC. “It can build any type of launch vehicle and any type of satellite. Using these launch vehicles, it can put its satellites into different types of orbits.”
