The Indian Space Programme

by Gurbir Singh

  Goddard and Tsiolkovskii never met but received a public introduction in October 1923 via a report in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia titled ‘Is Utopia Really Possible’.[39] The report covered Oberth’s recently published book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space and a suggestion within it that current rocket technology was sufficiently advanced for a vehicle to leave Earth and enter space. The news report concluded with reference to a press release from the Smithsonian Institute, in which Goddard speculated on the possibility of a rocket that could impact the Moon and astronomers on Earth being able to observe the resulting explosion. The newspaper report received a surprisingly large coverage, bringing the names of Tsiolkovskii, Oberth and Goddard greater international recognition. One immediate consequence was a disgruntled Tsiolkovskii republishing his 1903 paper, in which two decades earlier, he had published much of what Oberth was publishing now. Reasserting his own work, he complained “Do we always have to get from foreigners what originated in our boundless homeland and died in loneliness from neglect?”[40]

  Figure 1‑7 Robert Goddard at his launch control shack. Credit NASA

  The consensus among modern historians is that Tsiolkovskii , Oberth and Goddard were the founding fathers of rocketry. By the time Vikram Sarabhai established the nascent space programme in India in 1963, only Oberth was alive. At 76, half a century after the mockery at the hands of his PhD examiners, he was present at Cape Canaveral to watch humanity's greatest technological achievement, the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969.[41] He lived until 1989. Hermann Oberth’s life must have been a journey of an extraordinary vision fulfilled.

  Scramble for German Rocket Technology

  Even before the formal end of World War II, the first signs of the Cold War hostilities began to emerge. In the final stages of the war, as the US army approached Germany from the west, they instigated operation ‘Paperclip' with the objective of acquiring German rocket scientists and the associated infrastructure.[42] The USSR was doing the same thing in their approach to Germany from the East. The British joined the scramble for German technology by sending Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Morce Weeks (1890–1960), Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff for this purpose. Weeks considered the acquisition of German equipment as “one of the most vitally important of our immediate post-war aims.”[43]

  In February 1945, as the defeat of Hitler’s (1889–1945) forces became imminent, Major Robert Staver of the US Army arrived in Europe with the mission to seize German technical know-how, equipment and the engineers who had developed it and transport them to the US. Soon after his arrival in Europe, Major Staver experienced the deadly force of a V2 first-hand. His US base in London was caught in a V2 explosion, and he narrowly avoided becoming a victim of his quarry.[44] He succeeded in acquiring not only the key personnel, designs and up to a hundred V2 rockets, but also a wind tunnel. The wind tunnel used for testing the rocket Saturn V was designed by von Braun’s colleague Oscar Carl Holderer (1919–2015) and was still in use in 2015.[45]

  On 11 April 1945, just ahead of Germany’s formal surrender, Nordhausen was liberated by the US forces. Situated on the southern edge of the Harz Mountains in the centre of Germany, Nordhausen today is a picturesque town. During the war, its mountains became the ideal secure location for building weapons of war, including von Braun’s V2 rockets. In a frantic operation, the US forces removed trainloads of complete and partially built V2s, component parts and the machinery used to make them from Nordhausen to the Belgian port of Antwerp by 22 May, before onward transport to the US. The haste was necessary because Nordhausen fell in the Soviet, not the American zone of occupation. In February 1945, the Allies had met and agreed at the Yalta Conference that Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation, American, Soviet, British and French. However, when Germany formally surrendered on 8 May 1945, the four allies were scattered across Germany. Nordhausen was formally occupied by the USSR only on 26 May 1945, but by then, the Americans had removed all key V2 assets. The US won the race for German rocket technology, and by doing so, they also achieved the equally significant feat of denying the USSR this substantial advantage. The stage was set for the Space Race to begin.

  Korolev, the Chief Designer

  Known to the West only as the anonymous chief designer until after his premature death in 1966, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev is widely regarded as the founder of USSR’s space programme. Korolev grew up through a period of political unrest and military conflict. Two years before Korolev was born, in 1905, the first of the series of Russian Revolutions had begun. He was not quite yet a teenager when he lived through the 1917 Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed. Korolev was brought up by his mother in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. He lived through one of the city’s most turbulent periods: World War I, Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War. Between 1917 and 1920, Kiev changed hands between the various factions over a dozen times.

  Korolev’s early education was ad hoc. He made it to college as an uneasy peace gradually replaced the tumult of war. It was an ill-equipped vocational college, and he enrolled for a course on carpentry and roof tiling. In 1913, ten years after the Wright brothers had demonstrated the first powered flight, a five-year-old Korolev saw a man-made flying machine. Sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders at a fairground in Ukraine, he saw the plane take off, fly two kilometres and land again. For most watching the plane fly, it would have been a spectacle tantamount to magic. The experience wowed the spectators and perhaps mesmerised Korolev into a future career in aviation. In 1917, his mother remarried, and they moved to Odessa, where he experienced his first flight aboard a seaplane on the Black Sea.

  In his late teens, Korolev’s interest in flight drew him to gliders. Gliders, then commonly known as sailplanes, were much more popular and practical in the early 20th century than they are today. Korolev honed his basic theory and practical flight skills and progressed to designing and building, as well as flying, gliders. Later in life, with his experience in rockets, he developed a passion for rocket planes well before the jet age. By the 1930s, aircraft engines were becoming more powerful, but he believed that rocket power rather than the combustion engine was the future of aviation.

  Korolev had been part of the small team of rocket enthusiast largely self-funded, that in November 1933 led the USSR to launch its first liquid-fuelled rocket. While he was developing those ideas in the mid-1930s, his name appeared on a death list as part of Joseph Stalin's (1878–1953) Great Purge.[46] For unknown reasons, he survived the firing squad. Many of his fellow rocket scientists did not and perished in what came to be known as the Great Terror. Imprisoned in 1938 for 10 years in a harsh Siberian labour camp, he was moved in 1942 to another labour camp where his engineering skills could be put to work to support the Soviet war machine.

  Figure 1‑8 Sergei Korolev middle of picture transporting his glider to the launch site in October 1929. Credit Natalya Koroleva

  As the war ended, Korolev was among the Soviet rocket specialists sent to Germany to assess and acquire for the USSR the technological advances made by the German rocket and aviation research teams. Released on parole, Korolev travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1945. A few weeks later, he met up with his fellow rocket scientist Valentin Petrovich Glushko (1908–1989), who had arrived a few weeks earlier also in pursuit of German rocket technology. The two had worked with each other since the early 1930s, successfully launching rockets using liquid fuel. In Germany, with the Nazis vanquished, they now got a chance to see a V2 in action. In October 1945, British forces organised the launch of three V2s under their control from the northern city of Cuxhaven to evaluate and learn their technical secrets.

  Representatives from France, the USSR and US were invited. Only three representatives had been invited from the USSR but five, including Korolev, turned up. Korolev had to pose as a chauffeur to get in. Glushko was one of the three allowed inside the compound while Korolev had to observe from outside the perimeter fence. The sight o
f a large, powerful guided rocket streaking into the sky must have rekindled the original dreams of spaceflight that had brought Glushko and Korolev together in the 1930s. Their combined forces would pull off the surprise of the century by putting Sputnik, an artificial satellite, in Earth’s orbit just twelve years.

  Immediately after the war, most of the German rocket technology ended up in the US, some in USSR and a little in France and Britain. In the USSR, the German missile technology was first replicated and then quickly enhanced with Soviet innovations. A leading German rocket engineer Helmut Grötrupp (1916–1981) had chosen the USSR, as Wernher von Braun had chosen the US. Grötrupp also helped to identify German rocket engineers who, like him, could assist the USSR. In 1946, he wrote a detailed report for the USSR on how they had solved many of the technical problems of the V2. While von Braun helped the Americans to develop their rocket programme, Grötrupp did likewise for the USSR. The starting point in both cases was Nazi Germany’s state-of-the-art technological marvel, the V2 missile.

  With surprising speed, Soviet engineers guided by Korolev developed and transformed the technology of the V2 into their own indigenous design, the R1. By 1953, Korolev was convinced that the German engineers could offer no more assistance, and to keep them at a distance from the new Soviet secret innovations, many including Grötrupp were sent back to Germany.

  Korolev was the team leader behind two of humanity's greatest achievements. After the launch of Sputnik, he also headed the team that put the first man in space. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) designated Korolev's name a state secret. To the outside world, he was known only as the chief designer. Khrushchev’s decision to withhold Korolev’s identity from the Nobel Prize committee denied Korolev two opportunities of winning the Nobel Prize, one for Sputnik and another for his contribution to Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s (1934–1968) flight, and the international recognition that would have followed.[47]

  It is remarkable that despite the false accusations, harsh imprisonment and brutal treatment, Korolev went on to dedicate his life's work to the very state that had undermined him and unjustly punished him.[48] Today, a street, a town, a museum, a crater on the Moon and another on Mars carry his name. His daughter Natalya Koroleva, who is openly bitter about the treatment that her father had received at the hands of the State, has converted his former home into a museum, a shrine to his memory.[49] It is regularly visited by rocket engineers, historians and space enthusiasts from all around the world. In death, he finally received the respect, and national and international recognition, that had been denied him during his life.

  Von Braun and the Moon

  Widely recognised as the rocket genius behind the successful American Apollo programme to the Moon, von Braun is one of the most intriguing and controversial characters in the story of mankind’s first steps into space. In 1944, Hitler awarded von Braun the Knight’s Cross for his contribution in developing the V2 combat ballistic missile.[50] In January 1959, von Braun received the Distinguished Federal Civilian Service Award from President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) in the White House. The V2 missiles were introduced in September 1944, and they killed approximately 5,000 people. Built by slave labour, more people were killed in making the V2 than by their military use.[51] Despite the death and destruction caused by the V2s in London during the final months of the War, the London-based British Interplanetary Society awarded von Braun its first Gold Medal in 1961.[52] The second Gold Medal went to Yuri Gagarin during his visit to London on 11 July 1961.

  As Hitler’s chief rocket scientist, von Braun developed the world’s first rockets with enough power to reach space, and in some accounts, he inadvertently did so as early as 1942.[53] In the final months before his suicide, Hitler ordered the destruction of German resources from which the victors could benefit; this included patriotic skilled Germans. Von Braun spent the last few months of the war evading execution by his own German Army as he doctored an escape out of Germany. Of all the nations, the USSR had suffered the greatest losses in the War von Braun, fearing that “it’s the Russians who will take revenge”, headed west towards the approaching US forces, along with his team of rocket scientists.[54] His brother Magnus contacted the Anti-Tank Company, 324th Infantry of the US Armed Forces with the words “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V2. Please, we want to surrender.”[55] In the end, von Braun and members of his team survived the war and, with pretty much all his engineering designs intact, made it safely to America.

  At the end of the War, German technological lead in rockets was assessed to be 25 years.[56] Von Braun estimated that he needed a further two years of V2 development to bring the US within its range. Perhaps, it was this that motivated Major Staver to send a remarkable message to the Pentagon. He suggested that “a policy and procedures be established for the evacuation of other German personnel whose future scientific importance outweighs their present war guilt.”[57] The programme to exploit German scientists in and for the US was set up as a secret operation called Overcast to be managed by the US military intelligence.[58]

  The US placed national interest ahead of justice and concluded that von Braun’s unique experience was too valuable to be lost in the gallows. In June 1945, the putative prisoner of war von Braun, along with other members of his team, was loaned by the US to the UK. During the 10 days of his interrogation in a POW camp at Wimbledon in London, von Braun was taken to witness first-hand the site of destruction where one of his V2s had landed only months earlier. The British invited him and his team to abandon the contracts they had signed to work for the Americans and to work for the British rocket programme instead. The UK, after all, was much nearer to their home country, Germany, but he declined.[59]

  Figure 1‑9 Wernher von Braun with President Kennedy 16 November 1963. Credit NASA

  Initially, some in the US wanted von Braun to be treated like any other potential war criminal. However, the US military decided that von Braun and his team’s technical expertise could be useful in the war still raging in the Pacific.

  Despite being questioned in the US and briefly in London, von Braun was officially able to convince his interrogators of his innocence of any war crimes[60]. The three-way unjust and unconscionable alliance between the US and UK governments and von Braun exploited each other at the expense of the rule of law. Von Braun was never formally tried, and he successfully engineered his future, working on the space programme in the US. In 1955, von Braun became a US citizen. Citizenship was an essential prerequisite for him to have access to and work on secret US military projects. The decision that the US defence programme should benefit from a former Nazi was not welcomed by all Americans. President Eisenhower expressed his disquiet. But in the end, as the Cold War set in, the pursuit of US national interest prevailed.

  Von Braun was an “extremely eloquent and self-assured individual” concluded Reginald George Turnill (1915–2013), a BBC journalist who covered the US space programme and interviewed von Braun many times during the Apollo era. During a visit in 1990 to the Dora Concentration Camp in Nordhausen, which was used for the production of V2 rockets, Turnill reflected once again on his assessment of von Braun and concluded that von Braun had “cheated the hangman.”[61] Another analysis of von Braun’s ethics concluded “Wernher von Braun’s life was one dedicated wholeheartedly to the goal of putting men in space and on the Moon. To achieve this goal, von Braun made many morally questionable decisions. Given the highly emotive context, his decisions and the subsequent reassessments are subjective and are reinterpreted by each generation.”[62]

  The two architects of the Space Race during the Cold War, Korolev and von Braun, never met. von Braun had left a few months before Korolev arrived in Germany on 8 September 1945. [63] Over the next two decades, both men faced each other in the epic rivalry that came to be known as the Space Race and resulted in the most accelerated period of rocketry development in human history. Despite their profound differences, Korolev and von Braun share
d key characteristics. They were technical geniuses, gifted people managers and ambitious men with an almost infinite energy to pursue their goal of spaceflight.

  Sarabhai and India's Space Programme

  At a time when India had no space scientists or infrastructure and the idea of India having a space programme appeared a fantasy, Vikram Sarabhai embarked on a bold, seemingly impossible mission. Independent India was maturing as a nation when the Space Age arrived. It could either join the Space Race right away or delay and pay the price of catching up later. Although one of the earliest nations to have joined the space club, India entered well after the Space Race had begun. It was on 21 November 1963 that India launched its first rocket into space.

  Although a scientist, Vikram Sarabhai was not a rocket scientist. He did, however, share with Korolev and von Braun the traits of being a great communicator, skilful manager and highly energetic person. Like Korolev, Vikram Sarabhai grew up through a period of political unrest. In 1930, at the age of 11, he was actively taking part in the Indian independence movement. In 1945, at 26, he was in the UK to complete his PhD that had been interrupted by World War II. His venture into building rockets and exploring space was still over a decade and a half away.

  Although there is no prominent record, it is likely that Sarabhai met von Braun during his many trips to the US. With the mission to the Moon successfully completed, von Braun was sent to India in 1973 with another mission: to “explore possible sales of communication satellites and launch facilities. Sales potential for the package was roughly 10 million dollars.”[64] By then, however, Sarabhai had died, and Abdul Kalam was assigned to meet him upon arrival in Madras (now Chennai) and subsequently give him a tour of Thumba. When von Braun arrived, India had already established a non-commercial arrangement with NASA for a one-year loan of its communication satellite ATS-6 as part of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) programme. Kalam recalls von Braun’s words expressing his passion for rocketry “do not make rocketry your profession... make it your religion.”[65] Kalam reflected on the parallels between Sarabhai and von Braun when he remarked “Did I see something of Prof. Vikram Sarabhai in von Braun? It made me happy to think so.