The Indian Space Programme

by Gurbir Singh

  Both India and Pakistan were part of CCSRC established in 1960. When the CCSRC met for the second time on 29 September 1961, India was represented by S. Chandrasekaran and Pakistan by Abdus Salam (1926–1996) and C.K. Raheem.[373] This was probably the last time that India’s and Pakistan’s space programmes were on par. Since then, while India has continued to invest in and develop its space programme, the absence of political and financial investment has stunted the growth of Pakistan’s programme. In 2017, Pakistan chose not to participate in India’s South Asian Satellite where India offered the free use of a transponder for each of the SAARC member countries. The political and scientific leadership in India were driven by the shared vision of science enabling social and economic growth. This has sustained investment in the space programme since its inception. At that time, Pakistan probably shared the same vision and aspiration. NASA was supporting India and Pakistan by hosting engineers from both courtiers in Wallops for training during from 1962. One Indian engineer describes this encounter as “we found that they were no different from us in attitude, culture or even language.”[374]

  Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), Pakistan’s space agency, was founded in 1961 led by Abdus Salam. He was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics in 1979 for his work in developing the idea of the electro-weak force, unifying for the first time two of the four fundamental forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. Unlike Vikram Sarabhai, Salam’s roots had no connection to great wealth or social status. Nevertheless, he followed a path similar to Sarabhai’s. With outstanding educational accomplishments as a young student in Pakistan, he attracted a scholarship to go to Cambridge and achieved a double-first in theoretical physics and mathematics. After a short spell of working in his home country in the early 1950s, he spent most of his professional life researching and teaching in the UK, US and Italy. Salam was the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government of Pakistan and a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission when, under his recommendation, Pakistan’s space agency Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) was established.

  Figure 7‑4 Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission. Credit SUPARCO

  Under his leadership, Pakistan established a rocket launch facility and sent several of SUPARCO engineers and scientists for training at NASA installations in the US. Throughout the 1960s, both the US and USSR were investing heavily in their manned Earth observation and interplanetary exploration programmes. To help expand their geopolitical influence, numerous joint programmes were established with countries that had an interest in developing national space programmes of their own. Two of the earliest such joint ventures were between BNCSR, NASA and SUPARCO. Under this agreement, sounding rockets launched from Sonmiani would investigate the upper atmosphere (between 50–150 km) during IQSY of 1965.

  The IGY was a period of high solar activity; IQSY was exactly the opposite.[375] The influential chairman of BNCSR, Harrie Massey, had travelled from the UK to attend an INCOSPAR meeting in Ahmedabad in India and was one of the first Westerners to see the initial plans for the Indian launch site at Thumba. During the same trip in September 1962, Massey also visited the Sonmiani launch site in Pakistan.[376] In 1990, with assistance from China and the USSR, SUPARCO launched its first experimental satellite, BADR-1 and BADR-B in 2001. While Pakistan has active programmes of communication and remote-sensing satellites, it has not pursued an indigenous launch vehicle capability as India has.

  Today, SUPARCO has its headquarters in Karachi with ground and research stations in Islamabad, Multan, Peshawar and Lahore. Its space projects today are not as far reaching as contemplated at the outset. One notable contributor to SUPARCO was a Polish Air Force pilot, Władysław Turowicz. He was born in 1908 in Siberia, the USSR, and died in 1980 in Karachi, Pakistan. He joined the Royal Air Force in the UK and flew against the Luftwaffe over Europe during World War II. Turowicz moved to Pakistan after the War to help build Pakistan’s air force and ended up as SUPARCO’s administrator between 1967 and 1970. His military connections and experience in aeronautics allowed him to support Abdus Salam in developing Pakistan’s early aerospace and missile technologies. In 1954, Abdus Salam left Pakistan and set up home in Europe although he continued to play a significant role in Pakistan’s atomic and space programmes for many years. Salam had the intellectual capacity, vision and the desire to develop Pakistan’s space ambitions comparable to that of his counterpart Sarabhai in India. He had the international clout and contacts to engage Pakistan with the UN and the collaborative scientific effort of the IGY, as India had done. But religious prejudice, factional politics and the absence of visionaries in the government prevented him from doing so.

  In 1964, Salam established the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy, where he had a base spanning many years. The Centre was Salam’s vision to help develop the skills of scientists from developing countries, foster international collaboration and mitigate the brain drain of scientists in developing countries that would otherwise ensue. In 1997, a year after his death, the Centre was renamed the Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics. Unlike Vikram Sarabhai, who is celebrated as the father of the Indian space programme, Salam has been largely sidelined and forgotten in his own country.[377] Even though his achievements have largely gone unrecognised in Pakistan, many countries around the world, including India, have awarded Salam honorary doctorates in acknowledgement of his work. TIFR awarded him an honorary fellowship, and he received an honorary doctorate from Amritsar.

  Salam had encouraged former ISRO chairman and space scientist Professor U.R. Rao to study cosmic rays, indirectly influencing the space programme in India.[378] Freeman Dyson (born 1923), a theoretical physicist, astronomer and mathematician, considers Salam his hero and goes on to say that he “was great as a scientist, greater as an organiser, greatest as the voice of conscience speaking for the advancement of science among the poorer two-thirds of mankind.”[379]

  Despite only a day’s difference in gaining independence and joining the space race around the same time, India’s and Pakistan’s space programmes have evolved very differently. Pakistan’s smaller economy and its unstable political environment seem to be the primary factors for this difference. India has a larger economy, which is better placed to provide the large investments that space programmes require, and the Indian economy has grown under secular democratic politics that has, largely prevailed since independence. ISRO in India has an annual budget of around $1 billion, whereas SUPARCO in Pakistan operates with approximately $30.6 million.[380] While India has mostly enjoyed political stability, sectarianism and military coups have regularly disrupted democracy in Pakistan resulting in economic, political and social instability. The general election of 2013 in Pakistan was the first instance when one democratically elected government handed over power to another in a peaceful transition. A precarious political and economic environment is not one where national space programme can flourish.

  First Launch in India

  On Thursday, 21 November 1963, as the Sun set over the southern Indian state of Kerala, an orange glow appeared high in the evening twilight sky. The spectacle was seen by viewers for whom the Sun had just set, but was still shining 100 km above. The glow came from an exploding cylinder of sodium vapour supplied by France, launched aboard a Nike-Apache rocket from the US while a computer from the USSR measured its altitude. This was India’s first venture into space.[381]

  By the early 1960s, investigation of the high-altitude atmosphere at the edge of space using sodium vapour delivered by rockets was well established. By photographing from different locations, the dissipation over time of the orange sodium vapour cloud, usually a column several tens of kilometres long, scientists were able to calculate the changing magnitude and direction of the winds at the range of altitudes the cloud cuts through. The idea for the first rocket launch with a sodium payload from Indian soil came out of a conversation in the US between
Praful Bhavsar and Professor Jacques Blamont, the Technical Director for the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) established in France by President Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) in 1961.

  As a post-doc fellow in 1962, Bhavsar was assisting Professor Blamont in an IGY project researching high-altitude radiation using balloons at the University of Minnesota in the US. Bhavsar arranged Blamont to meet with Sarabhai in Washington in May 1962, which led eventually to a strong friendship. This was a significant point in Indo-French history. Blamont and Sarabhai’s meeting took place against the backdrop of the formal end of French control on parts of India it had ruled for centuries.[382] Half a century on, Blamont recalls fondly that “Sarabhai was playing games between different benefactors” to secure for India the essential resources for its first rocket launch.[383]

  Figure 7‑5 Battle of Guntur 1780. Credit Charles Hubbell

  The launch site Thumba had been secured and brought into operation with assistance from the UN and in the spirit of collaboration of the IGY. Sarabhai acquired a Nike-Apache sounding rocket with launcher from NASA and a Mi-4 range recovery helicopter, a shaking table for pre-flight tests and a Minsk-II electronic computer from the USSR. CNES from France donated the sodium payload and ground equipment, including COTAL LB Radar,[384] which had a range of 300 km for tracking rocket trajectory.[385] On 14 January 1963, NASA had announced the signing of a MoU with the DAE in India that initiated a programme of collaboration between the US and India. The key scientific objective was to understand, through experiment, the EEJ and upper-atmosphere winds from Thumba, where the geomagnetic equator was overhead. The agreement with NASA included nine Nike-Apache and four Nike-Cajun launch vehicles, along with ground-launching and tracking equipment on an on-loan basis. The US would also provide training to the Indian engineers who would subsequently perform the launches in India. It was up to India to supply four sodium-vapour release payloads, photographic equipment, launch site and facilities, personnel and supporting meteorological data prior to the launch.[386]

  As part of the MoU, several Indian engineers received training in NASA centres (including Goddard Spaceflight Centre and Wallops Flight Facility) in the US to help in the preparation and eventual rocket launch from India.[387] R. Aravamudan was a member of the first batch of Indian scientists to visit NASA, and he recalls that “to begin with, we were a group of four: Ramakrishna Rao, Kale, Prakash Rao and me. After about three months, H.G.S. Murthy, Easwaradas and Abdul Kalam joined us.”[388]

  Figure 7‑6 Nike-Apache at Thumba. Credit Professor Praful Bhavsar

  In early 1963, Abdul Kalam was surprised to see an intriguing painting hanging in the reception of Wallops Flight Facility. It was a painting depicting the Battle of Guntur, which reminded him of India’s long tradition in rocketry. In his biography, Kalam points out that the painting depicted “a fact forgotten in Tipu’s own country but commemorated here on the other side of the planet.”[389] Except for Stephen Smith’s experiments with rocket mail in the 1930s, no rocket development had taken place in India since Tipu almost two centuries earlier.

  The Nike-Apache was a 7.5 m long unguided two-stage solid-propellant rocket reconstructed from parts originally developed for the American surface to air missile programme. It was, in fact, two distinct rockets one on top of another. A lower stage (0.5 m diameter 3.8-m-long) Apache was fitted to a slimmer upper stage (0.16m diameter and a 3.7-m-long) Nike.[390] Following ignition, the Apache would burn for 3.4 seconds followed by a gap of 16.5 seconds before the second-stage Nike fired for 6.3 seconds. Collectively, that generated sufficient thrust to deliver a payload of around 50 kg to over 200 km when launched at an elevation angle of 80°.[391] The Nike-Apache rocket was one of NASA’s most efficient and reliable rockets and was retired eventually in 1980.

  On 9 September 1963, NASA launched a sounding rocket taking a 35-kg payload of instruments 106 miles (170.5 km) during a 6-minute-and-40-second flight. This launch of a Nike-Apache from its Wallops Flight Facility off the Virginian coast was in “preparation for the EEJ programme to be conducted from India.”[392] Two months later, India launched its first rocket.

  Inaugural events, by definition, lack previous history and traditionally attract unexpected problems. NASA delivered the first Nike-Apache rocket to the Indian capital by US military air transport. On its 2,000-km (1,242.7 miles) journey by road south to Kerala, practically the full length of the country, the truck broke down.

  Jacques Blamont contacted Abdul Kalam in the US, who was receiving training at NASA. He had agreed to provide the payload, a sodium ejector fabricated in his laboratory.[393] Blamont asked Kalam to hand-deliver it from his office in Minnesota to India. Upon arrival in India, the sodium cylinder, an explosive device, was impounded under the Indian Explosives regulations. Eventually, both the rocket and its payload arrived in Thumba, where the two were to be integrated.

  During payload integration, it was discovered that the sodium cylinder, the payload, did not fit inside the rocket. The French had been using the metric system, and the Americans used the imperial. The payload diameter was larger by a few millimetres and would require machining. Bhavsar, the project scientist, recalled “The sodium-vapour package was a pyrotechnic. It would explode if the temperature exceeded 800°C.” Machining was too risky, so a skilled mechanic Mr Ratilal Panchal was brought to Thumba from Ahmedabad to do the job by hand. Bhavsar recalls that to assure the mechanic of their confidence, “Kalam and I sat with the mechanic while he manually machined the cylinder for comfort.”[394]The church was the only large, solid construction within the land acquired by INCOSPAR, and much of the work, including payload integration, was done there. Rocket integration and safety were Abdul Kalam’s responsibilities.

  Figure 7‑7 R. Aravamudan (right) and A.P.J Abdul Kalam (left) integrating payload

  for a sounding rocket launch in 1964. Credit Professor Praful BhavsarOn the day of the launch, the hydraulic system of the crane on the truck transporting the assembled rocket from the church to the launch platform sprung a leak. With launch time approaching, the rocket was lifted in place physically “using our collective muscle power.”[395] Five minutes prior to the launch, a loud alarm was sounded to instruct all personnel to return to the blockhouse. However, P. Kale recalls that two minutes after the alarm, there was a “man still adjusting the launcher”, who had to be instructed to evacuate to the safety of the blockhouse.[396]

  Two minutes after sunset on Thursday, 21 November 1963, at 6:23 pm, the rocket was launched by an electronic trigger. The first stage ignited and powered the rocket for 3.5 seconds; after a delay of 16.5 seconds, the second-stage Apache ignited and burned for 6.5 seconds. The separation between the two stages occurred naturally by differential forces.[397] As the second stage fired, its acceleration pulled it away from the spent first stage below. Several seconds before reaching the maximum altitude, the sodium-vapour payload was released during the ascent initiating a vertical column of bright sodium vapour. About four minutes after the launch, the rocket achieved its maximum altitude of about 140 km and started its free fall descent into the Arabian Sea. The launch was a dramatic relief and a complete success for the Indian scientists and engineers on their first mission. It was observed by many Keralites, and the Kerala Assembly paused to view the spectacle.[398]

  Figure 7‑8 Sodium-Vapour Trail. 21 November 1963. Credit Professor Praful Bhavsar

  The primary purpose of this flight was to measure the atmospheric winds and turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere between 40 and 200 km. Space is now internationally agreed to begin from a 100-km altitude above the Earth’s surface, although technically, Earth’s atmosphere continues for several hundred kilometres beyond. The payload was ignited during the ascent leaving a vertical column of sodium vapour. The rate and direction of the subsequent dispersal of this column would help scientists to understand the physics of the upper atmosphere. As the rocket did not carry a radio transmitter, all the science data were to be captured by radar, photographic
camera and visual observations from the ground.

  Four teams of photographers located in four pre-selected locations around the launch site in Kanyakumari, Palayamkottai, Kodaikanal and Kottayam were to record a series of images that would show the speed, direction, turbulence and the rate of diffusion of the sodium vapour once it was released at its designated altitude. The sky was completely overcast at Kodaikanal and partially so at Kottayam at the time of the launch. Useful pictures were taken from the other two locations.[399] Sarabhai concluded “Putting together information from these stations where the cloud was photographed against the background of stars, it will be possible to gain fresh insight into the complicated problems connected with the Electrojet.”[400]

  Figure 7‑9 Vikram Sarabhai and Jacques Blamont in Kanyakumari. January 1964.

  Credit Jacques Blamont

  The success of the flight was due to critical contributions from the US, the USSR and France. However, except for two French and two American engineers who were available for advice, only Indian scientists and engineers were involved in the launch operations. None had any previous experience of launching rockets into space. International media reports of this achievement were, however, lost amidst another dramatic event that took place on the other side of the world on the following day: the assassination of the US President Kennedy on 22 November 1963.