Feb 1962๐ Backgroundtap to expand
Indian National Committee for Space Research formed
PM Nehru appoints Vikram Sarabhai to chair INCOSPAR, the precursor to ISRO. The framing: 'space for development', not space race.
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From rocket parts on bullock carts to Chandrayaan-3 โ the ISRO arc
ISRO's first sounding rocket flew in 1963 with parts arriving by bicycle. Sixty years later it became the first space agency to land near the Moon's south pole โ for less than a Hollywood blockbuster.
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Understand in 2 minutes
On 23 August 2023, the Vikram lander of India's Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down on the lunar surface 600 km from the Moon's south pole. India became the first country in history to land in that region โ the suspected site of subsurface water ice โ and the fourth country ever to soft-land on the Moon, after the United States, Soviet Union, and China. The mission cost โน615 crore (~$74 million), less than the budget of the Hollywood film Interstellar. ISRO had been founded six decades earlier, in 1969, growing out of a committee that PM Nehru and physicist Vikram Sarabhai had set up in 1962. The first ISRO rocket, an American Nike-Apache sounding rocket flown from Thumba on 21 November 1963, was assembled in a converted church and famously transported part-by-part on bicycles and bullock carts.
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Bicycles, fishing villages, and the Thumba launch
The first Indian launch site was chosen for proximity to the geomagnetic equator: Thumba, a fishing village on the Kerala coast. The local Catholic church, St. Mary Magdalene, was acquired with consent from the Bishop of Trivandrum and converted into a workshop; the Bishop's house became the first office. The November 1963 launch carried a sodium-vapour payload to study upper-atmosphere winds. The rocket itself โ a Nike-Apache โ was American; the payload was French; the range tracking was Soviet. Sarabhai's strategy was to build collaborations with everyone simultaneously and avoid alignment with either Cold War bloc. By 1969, the Indian Space Research Organisation was formally set up. By 1975, ISRO launched its first satellite, Aryabhata, on a Soviet rocket. The 1980 SLV-3 launch put Rohini-1 into orbit using an entirely Indian rocket โ making India the seventh country with home-built orbital launch capability.
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The four scientists who shaped ISRO
Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971) โ founder. Cambridge-educated, head of the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, drafted the original space-program proposal. Died at 52, before he could see his vision mature. ISRO's lunar lander is named Vikram in his honour. Satish Dhawan (1920-2002) โ second chairman, 1972-1984. Engineering professor at IISc, took over after Sarabhai's death and built the institutional culture: technical review boards, no political interference, no over-promising. The Sriharikota launch range is named after him. APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015) โ led the SLV-3 program, India's first home-built orbital launch vehicle. Later led DRDO's missile program and became President of India in 2002. K. Sivan (b. 1957) โ chairman 2018-2022, oversaw Chandrayaan-2 (failed soft landing 2019) and the planning for Chandrayaan-3. Public face of the program during the dramatic 2019 last-two-minutes Vikram crash.
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