The Indian Space Programme

by Gurbir Singh

  The possibility of Commonwealth countries collaborating in space research was raised during the COSPAR meeting held in Nice in January 1960. As a result, the Commonwealth Consultative Space Research Committee (CCSRC) was established with the intention of using sounding rockets as an instrument for investigation. A coordinated programme of sounding rockets to be launched from the UK, Canada, Australia, India and Pakistan was initiated. It was intended to provide invaluable insights into the Earth’s atmosphere at 80 km. Meaningful participation for India, however, would require a complex set of ingredients. The most significant of which perhaps was the vision of an academically gifted, industrious and a well-connected individual, Homi Bhabha.

  Indian National Committee for Space Research

  When the Space Age arrived, India was very much a third world nation. Having led independent India for just over a decade, Nehru with bold vision directed Bhabha to ensure India was not left behind in the new era of space. In the absence of any experience of space and completely devoid of infrastructure, the first rocket launch in India would necessarily draw on foreign expertise and resources. Born amidst the Cold War and the Space Race, India’s space programme was also driven by national prestige, just like in the US and USSR. Unlike them, however, the space programme in India, from the outset, was wholly non-military and targeted entirely to meet the social needs of its huge population.

  In February 1962, Bhabha created INCOSPAR, the Indian counterpart to international Council for Science COSPAR. Nehru was convinced that societies based on science had improved the quality of human life throughout history and that should be the path for the newly independent India. COSPAR proposed an extensive international synoptic (broad global coverage) sounding rocket programme to investigate, through experiment, the atmosphere around the globe in 1962. Sounding rockets were used to gather data on meteorology, ionosphere, solar activity, the Earth’s magnetic field and aeronomy. Aeronomy, a term more popular in the past than it is now, is the study of the atmosphere at altitudes above the point where balloons can reach but below where satellites orbit (approximately 50 km–100 km). Sounding rockets fill this gap perfectly.

  Vikram Sarabhai was appointed to lead INCOSPAR. Sponsored by the United Nations (UN), INCOSPAR was guided by the shared scientific ideals of the IGY. The primary goal of INCOSPAR was for India to “promote international cooperation in space research and exploration, and in the peaceful uses of outer space.”[347] The first step towards this broad and ambitious goal was to establish a team of scientists and engineers who would eventually deliver it. In the absence of domestic space experience, Sarabhai drew on his worldwide contacts to help garner the essential international support to kick-start India’s space programme.

  To broaden and strengthen the international connections, Sarabhai ensured that India made a strong contribution in the IGY. He organised international events and experiments in India and invited international scientists to participate. Through those connections, he arranged for Indian scientists and engineers to train abroad. Many of his experiments centred on cosmic rays, a subject he was familiar and comfortable with. In one experiment conducted in the Bolivian Andes, Indian scientists collected data on an elementary subatomic particle called Meson, working alongside scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Japan. Mesons are subatomic particles resulting from cosmic ray interactions that occur only in the high altitudes of the Earth’s atmosphere. High-altitude vantage points, like the Bolivian Alps are essential to detect them. In addition to sending Indian scientists to scientific institutions in the US and Europe, he encouraged Indian scientists and engineers based outside India to return and collaborate with the experiments hosted in India.

  Praful Bhavsar (born 1926) was one of the several Indian scientists whom Sarabhai brought back to India for India's nascent space programme. Bhavsar had completed his PhD under Sarabhai’s supervision in 1958 at the PRL and, in the same year, had moved to the University of Minnesota in the US to study cosmic rays. He conducted balloon experiments from Canada, carrying an X-ray spectrometer that he had built to detect high-altitude radiation and concluded that “he had a wonderful time for four years.”[348]

  Another scientist that Sarabhai successfully persuaded to return to India was U.R. Rao. Rao was a space scientist who had cut his scientific teeth in the 1960s working on solar wind interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field before moving to MIT. There, he worked on instruments carried by the early NASA interplanetary probes, Mariner, Explorer and Pioneer. Following multiple requests from Sarabhai, Rao eventually accepted and returned to India in 1966. Initially as a professor at the PRL, later, he held several high-ranking positions in India’s space programme, including the Chairman of ISRO. Writing in 2001, Rao asserted that Sarabhai’s interest “naturally led him to initiate a dynamic space programme for India, in the process making the PRL the cradle of the Indian space programme.”[349] By mid-1962, Sarabhai had the beginnings of a core team of scientists. Half a century later, this team has grown to 16,902 employees in ISRO.[350] For any space programme, a central capability is the capacity to build and launch rockets. INCOSPAR’s first task was to identify a suitable location within India to prepare and launch rockets.

  Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station

  While on the launch pad and immediately after launch, the rocket is a significant hazard to those in the close vicinity of the complex and the ground track of its trajectory. To mitigate this risk, launch sites are usually located in remote coastal locations with the trajectory taking the rocket over unpopulated coastal waters immediately after launch. India has thousands of miles of coastline. By another accident of geography, the Earth’s magnetic equator flows over the southern tip of India making it an ideal location to undertake the scientific study of high-altitude cosmic rays and the Equatorial ElectroJet (EEJ) 100 km directly overhead. Such investigation could not be done from other places in the world.

  The light from the Sun takes eight minutes to arrive on Earth, but particles emitted during a solar storm can take a couple of days. Upon arrival on Earth, these high-energy particles strip electrons from the molecules in the Earth’s tenuous upper atmosphere. These now charged particles make up an eastwardly flowing electric current called EEJ. Because this phenomenon relies on solar illumination, it only occurs on the dayside of the Earth. In some ways, conceptually similar to the jet stream, it is fundamentally different. The EEJ was discovered in the 1920s.[351] It is around 400 km (248.5 miles) wide, 100 km (62 miles) high and consists not wind (air molecules) but moving charged particles thus an electric current. The EEJ flows about 100 km high over the southern tip of India.

  Sarabhai had successfully invited P.R. Pisharody (1909–2002), a meteorologist working on cosmic ray research at MIT, to join the nascent INCOSPAR team. Pisharody and E.V. Chitnis, another of Sarabhai’s former students, were tasked with locating a site suitable for launching rockets in India. The first potential launch site identified was Vellanathuruthu, which meant ‘the sandbar of the white elephant’. Sarabhai’s response, Pisharody recalled later, was unequivocal “I’ll not have it here at any cost! No white elephant. The Government will not like it, the United Nations will not like it. We won't get it through. I can't. Shift it. Find another place.”[352]

  With input from NASA personnel, an alternative site 50 km south and 14 km north-west of Trivandrum, the state capital of Kerala, was selected.[353] It ticked all the boxes and moving to that site was a “comparatively smaller” undertaking compared to other options.[354] Called Thumba, it was named after a local plant that grew there in abundance. It was a parcel of land about 2.5 km (1.55 miles) long, squeezed between a railway line and the Indian Ocean and populated by a small fishing community. Thumba is 8.5°N of the equator[355] with up to 140 rainy days every year and temperature ranging between 20–35°C. The EEJ flowed directly overhead and sounding rockets launched from Thumba could easily collect data and provide critical insights into the Sun’s 11-year cycle. To
help with the assessment, a low-level flight over Thumba was arranged in 1962. Bhabha sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of a Dakota and Sarabhai standing next to him got their first aerial view of what would be India’s first spaceport.[356]

  In 1963, six years after the launch of Sputnik, India prepared to join the small number of countries with had launched rockets into space. A formal announcement on 21 January 1963 in the Parliament of India declared that Thumba, then still a small fishing village, would become India’s launch site for sounding rockets. India joined a race that had already started and, with incredible haste, acquired and redeveloped the site along with the accompanying infrastructure before the year was out. Thumba was transformed into TERLS and used to successfully launch a rocket into space from the Indian soil in November of the same year. It was a remarkably expeditious achievement given India’s formidable bureaucracy and its starting point of zero experience.

  The swift land acquisition was down to the personal intervention of key personnel. Homi Bhabha visited Thumba and used his significant influence to engage the central government officials very early on. K. Madhavan Nair, who at the time was the district collector of Trivandrum, acknowledges the generous support from the central and state governments, as well as the officers in charge of the local departments, which was essential in meeting the unusually tight schedule. He recalls “of all the cases of land acquisition I had to deal with during my tenure as District Collector, that associated with the Rocket Launching Station at Thumba proved to be the most difficult.”[357]

  Some claimed that its traditions went as far back as St. Francis Xavier’s visit to South India in 1554. In the 17th century, the region had been administered by Jesuit priests from Portugal during the Portuguese colonial period. In 1858, Pope Pius IX established the Diocese of Cochin, which incorporated Thumba, following an agreement with the Portuguese government. The largest building at the centre of the land INCOSPAR sought was the church of St. Mary Magdalene. Built at the start of the 20th century, this iconic building was considered by the villagers to be the heart of their community. It was consecrated ground with a Christian cemetery at the rear.

  Nair approached the Bishop of Trivandrum, the Right Reverend Dr Peter Pereira, to act as a mediator. As probably the most respected member of the community, the Bishop successfully persuaded the villagers to comply with the relocation request. During a few hectic months in the middle of 1963, the villagers were resettled in new housing in nearby Pallithura. It was not required that all families move. Some of the original families and their descendants still live along the road leading to the church. In 1968, in a speech delivered in the presence of the Prime Minister of India, Sarabhai thanked the Bishop “who spared no pains in supervising the rehabilitation of the displaced people.”[358]

  The facilities at Thumba for the staff members were basic. In the absence of regular transport services, during the early days at INCOSPAR staff used public train and bus services. Bicycles were used not only for travel but transport, giving rise to one of the iconic images of India’s space programme depicting a rocket cone being transported on the back of a bicycle. During this ‘Bicycle Era’ between 1963 and 1965, there was “a single green-coloured standard van” that served to meet all the requirements of the space programme at Thumba. Bicycles were used for everything else.[359] The church and temporary sheds were used for accommodation, and a canteen at the railway station was the nearest source of catering. One of the trainees that Sarabhai sent to the US recalled that it was “a very far cry indeed from the luxury in terms of equipment and facilities which we had got used to at Washington DC and Wallops Island.”[360]

  At this time, India’s experience with launching rockets was zero. H.G.S. Murthy, the Range Director at Thumba, recalls an apt comment from Sarabhai on the day of the first launch that described the situation in those days.[361] After inspecting the proposed launch site at Thumba, Murthy met with him and asked, “What is it you really want us to do?” Sarabhai was heard to say, “blind leading the blind”. Abdul Kalam, who went on to play a significant role in the Indian space programme and later in the national politics, was in charge of Integration and Range Safety Operations for the first rocket into space from India. He recalls the unusual setting for India’s first rocket launch facility “The St. Mary Magdalene church housed the first office of the Thumba Space Centre. The prayer room was my first laboratory, the Bishop’s room was my design and drawing office.”[362] This peculiar and unique setting was also an unlikely unifier of India’s diversity; Kalam a Muslim, Sarabhai a Hindu and a Christian church.

  During these early days, it was Sarabhai’s infinite optimism and his ability to persuade his growing team to share in his bold vision that propelled the project. As Korolev in the USSR and von Braun in the US had recognised, managing politicians and developing public expectations was just as important as the technological challenges. Sarabhai, through the Sarabhai family reputation, had already established contacts within the higher echelons Indian government. Through his travels, initially as a student in the UK and then as a researcher in the US, he had accumulated a substantial list of influential international contacts. He was mainly preoccupied with how the UN could help India start its space programme. The UN’s goal was to foster peaceful uses of space research and provide developing nations with practical training and education. In 1963, as the UN looked for an equatorial rocket launch site, India stepped forward as a willing host. With UN engagement, an Indian launch site would satisfy UN criteria for aid and be internationalised from the outset.

  Figure 7‑3 Former Church now a Museum with model launch vehicles in the foreground. Thumba. Credit Author

  Subsequently, Thumba was operated in accordance with the principles of the UN Outer Space Committee, which were broadly defined under four categories: (i) exploration of the upper atmosphere, including neutral particle and ion composition of the ionosphere, (ii) the study of the magnetic and electric fields associated with EEJ and their time variations in relation to solar activity, (iii) study of the meteorology of the stratosphere and mesosphere and (iv) research in selected aspects of astronomy. Thumba especially suitable.[363] In a formal ceremony at Thumba on 2 February 1968 attended by numerous international representatives, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dedicated TERLS as an “international range for scientific research open to all UN member states”. This was a conclusion to an undertaking made by her father and the Prime Minister at the time, Nehru, in 1962.[364] The UN dedication was in part a response to the support India had received, but it was also an acknowledgement of the unique role that only the UN could have played during the Cold War. The reorganisation following Sarabhai’s death, Thumba was subsumed within the VSSC in 1972.

  In the spirit of IGY and to fulfil the UN obligations for international collaboration, during the 1960s and 70s, Thumba launched sounding rockets not only for India but also for the UK, USSR, France, Germany and the US. By 1968, TERLS received an estimated $3 million (Rs.2.25 crore) for launching sounding Rockets for its international collaborators, the USSR, US, UK. On 9 February 1975, five Petrel rockets were launched in one day to examine ionospheric winds and the EEJ.[365] Several British universities, including Sussex, Birmingham and University College, London, along with UK’s meteorology office, used Petrel and Skua rockets with barium and strontium payloads to investigate high-altitude winds.

  India’s collaboration with the USSR was multifaceted. On 14 May 1970, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in Moscow between India and the USSR “to study the properties and processes which characterise the physical state of the stratosphere and mesosphere”. To conduct this study, about 50–70 meteorological rockets were launched annually from Thumba during the initial period of 1971–72.[366] The time for instruments to record data during a sounding rocket launch is very short. To acquire data over a longer period, the India-USSR collaboration included the use high-altitude balloons. Between 1977 and 1981, 67 experiments in extra-atmospheric astronomy were condu
cted on high-altitude Indian balloons carrying telescopes provided by the USSR.[367]

  Although Sriharikota on the east coast is used for all ISRO’s commercial and scientific launches, Thumba within the VSSC complex still remains in operation. By mid-2015, 2,345 rockets of all types had been launched from Thumba. Today, it continues with the tradition of launching sounding rockets on the third Wednesday of each month. Currently, ISRO has three operational sounding rockets with different capacities. RH200 from Thumba can deliver a payload of 10 kg to an altitude of 75 km, RH-300 Mk2 from Thumba or Sriharikota can deliver 70 kg to an altitude of 120 km, and RH-560 can deliver 100 kg to 550 km but is only launched from Sriharikota.[368]

  Pakistan’s Space Agency

  A day before India was officially independent, Pakistan became an independent nation. Although the US and USSR were already the undisputed leaders, other nations around the globe were starting to join the race. India took frantic first steps to advance its space technology to avoid being left behind in a relatively new arena. It is also possible that India’s haste was motivated by events closer home. On 7 June 1962, a NASA-built two-stage sounding rocket carrying a sodium-vapour payload was successfully launched from Sonmiani Rocket Range in Pakistan to an altitude of about 130 km. It was called Rehbar-I and was followed two days later by Rehbar-II.[369] Located about 150 km (93.2 miles) north-west of Karachi, the Sonmiani Rocket Range and the rocket launch site were set up with the help of NASA engineers from Wallops Flight Facility.[370] Professor U.R. Rao, former Director of ISRO, however, insists that it was the other way around. India had publicly announced the intention to build a rocket launch station in early 1962, and this motivated Pakistan to launch first.[371] With NASA’s help, Pakistan initiated its own sounding rocket programme in June 1962.[372]