Some weeks ago, the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a record 104 satellites; a feat so amazing that a top defence official in the Donald Trump administration was reportedly “shocked” on hearing of it. In the last few decades, ISRO has been able to launch hundreds of satellites and assorted payloads for government and international customers. This is due to the unswerving dependability of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) that has traversed as far as the moon and Mars.
Remembering Sarabhai
There is now a generation of adults who haven’t seen a plummeting PSLV, and Ramabhadran Aravamudan, who was among ISRO’s first recruits in 1962, takes the reader on an idyllic flashback into the space agency’s childhood and adolescence . ISRO: A Personal History , jointly authored by Aravamudan and his wife Gita — a journalist — begins with the suave, workaholic Vikram Sarabhai, convincing a 20-something Aravamudan to give up a safe job at the Department of Atomic Energy, to be among pioneers who would take India into space.
For Aravamudan, it was a career that involved conceiving rocket design in church parsonages with pigeons on the rafters for company; going around the world and figuring out how NASA and Arianespace (The French space company) put together rockets and looking out for global auctions where international, outdated space equipment could be bought cheap and re-used to make India’s first home-grown rockets.
That was a time, he reminisces, when noted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson would be ambling along the beach in Thumba, Kerala that was also the cradle of ISRO’s early rocket facilities. Bresson clicked Aravumudan, in a vest, and future Indian-president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, cobbling a payload for a sounding rocket and that became one of the iconic photographs of Indian space history.
For the most part, the authors adroitly fuse nostalgia, engineering technical-ese and loads of anecdotes (especially about Aravamudan’s close friend Dr. Abdul Kalam) that make the book an extremely enjoyable read. For instance, who, other than a confidant would know that the president of predominantly-socialist India was a fan of John Galt, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and literary hero of first-year engineering students world-over.
Given the length of Aravamudan’s tenure, ISRO, as a source of study, remains only superficially tapped.
