Let us shift our attention away from the lander to Chandrayaan-3, the satellite that carried it there, and to the story of India’s satellite dream, which began in 1972 in six rough industrial sheds outside Bengaluru.
Last week, as the Vikram lander descended into a graceful, precise, soft landing on the dark side of the moon, Indian hearts exploded in pride. This week, let us shift our attention away from the lander to Chandrayaan-3, the satellite that carried it there, and to the story of India’s satellite dream, which began in 1972 in six rough industrial sheds outside Bengaluru.
The problem with space technology is that countries guard their knowhow fiercely – there’s very little, and very sketchy, information available in the public domain. In 1966, therefore, Vikram Sarabhai, then director of the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) invited one of his former PhD students at Physical Research Laboratories (PRL) Ahmedabad, who had been researching solar cosmic-ray phenomena while working with Pioneer space probes and Explorer satellites at MIT, to return and head the satellite engineering team he was putting together. The brilliant young man who bought into the dream and would later be hailed as India’s Satellite Man was 34-year-old Udupi Ramachandra Rao.
When UR Rao took over the satellite program, he was the only one on the team to have ever seen a satellite. At that time, the satellite engineering team was divided between the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) near Trivandrum, and PRL in Ahmedabad. The untimely death of Sarabhai in 1971 brought Satish Dhawan to the helm of ISRO (INCOSPAR became ISRO in 1969). Unwilling to give up his job as Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Dhawan negotiated for ISRO to move to Bengaluru, providing the perfect opportunity for Rao, who had spent his boyhood in Ballari and the little village of Adamaru in Udupi, to decide to move the satellite centre here as well.
It wasn’t easy. The unionized labour force at TERLS went on the warpath, refusing to allow any equipment to be moved out. In Bengaluru itself, premises had to be found. At first, the IISc gymkhana was co-opted; later, the Karnataka government offered Rao a few sheds at the brand-new (read: entirely lacking facilities) Peenya Industrial Area outside town. In a dazzling feat of jugaad, involving thermocol, vinyl, and, presumably, duct tape, one of those dusty, asbestos-roofed sheds was converted into the ‘clean room’ required for satellite activity.
In those sheds, between 1972 and 1975, a young and inexperienced but passionate team of scientists and engineers – average age: 26 – put together, under Rao’s dynamic, inspiring. impatient leadership, India’s very first satellite, Aryabhata. It was a magnificent feat – no other country had built a satellite in under three years. The famous picture of Aryabhata being transported on a bullock cart was scoffed at in the American press, which questioned a poor country’s need for a space program. Rao explained it years later as another brilliant example of jugaad. The spacecraft had to be tested for electromagnetic capability and interference in an open area, but metal trucks threw off reflections that interfered with the satellite’s antenna. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of using a wooden bullock cart to transport it instead – et voila!
In 2017, at the age of 85, after overseeing the design of 18 more satellites, accelerating the development of satellite launch vehicles like the ASLVs and PSLVs during his decade-long tenure as Chairman of ISRO, and becoming the first Indian to be inducted into the International Astronautical Federation’s ‘Hall of Fame’, the much-decorated UR Rao died with his boots on. Since then, the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, which he so capably raised on the wings of a dream and a prayer, and where all the Chandrayaan satellites were built, has carried his name, and now goes by UR Rao Satellite Centre.
source/content: hindustantimes.com (headline edited)