Mission ISRO: Episode 2

Finding Thumba

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In 1957, the USSR pulled off a historic achievement in space. The Americans were disheartened but not discouraged. The Space Race was now officially hotting up.

Right in the middle of this Cold War, India found the perfect starting point for its space programme. All that Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha needed was an ideal launch site.

Far away in a tiny fishing hamlet in Kerala in south India, a priest was getting ready to deliver his Sunday sermon at church the next day. There’s a knock on his door. Vikram Sarabhai stood in front of the priest with a strange request.

Join renowned commentator Harsha Bhogle as he narrates the epic rags-to-space story of how India reached space. New episodes out every Friday.

Show Notes

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators

We wholeheartedly thank all our guests who appeared on this episode.

  • Asif Siddiqi – Space Historian
  • Pramod Kale – One of Sarabhai’s first students at PRL and the Indian scientist who was inspired to venture into space science thanks to Sputnik.
  • E.V Chitnis – Vikram Sarabhai’s right-hand man, a Padma Bhushan awardee and one of ISRO’s founding members.
  • Padmanabh Joshi – Author and organiser of the archives of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai at Nehru Foundation for Development, Ahmedabad

Links to clips used in this episode —

Transcript

On the morning of December 27, 2019, a streak of white could be seen across the bright blue skies above Thiruvananthapuram’s beaches. The white powdery zig-zaggy line originated from somewhere behind the cluster of coconut trees facing the sea. As it arched across the blue of the skies, it seemed to connect the sand and the skies for a fleeting moment.

This was no ethereal phenomenon. This was the RH 200, the Rohini sounding rocket zipping across the blue after being launched from the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thumba.

Minutes before the clock struck 9.30 in the morning, a group of Parliamentarians and ISRO scientists assembled on the hot white sandy beach as the countdown for the launch began.

At 9.30 am, the partial solar eclipse was at its maximum and the RH 200 was sent as a dutiful emissary of the earth to study the changes in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

Ahead of the launch, the district administration had declared nine kilometres of the shoreside in Thumba as a potential danger zone. Residents in Thumba were used to this. After all, in Thumba, it’s always cloudy with a chance of rockets.

Thumba is a tiny fishing hamlet that is a short 20 minute drive from Thiruvananthapuram. Tourists headed from Thiruvananthapuram to Varkala could easily miss it if they don’t look for it. But as small as it may be geographically, the significance that this tiny hamlet holds in India’s space journey is colossal.

For over fifty years now, Thumba has been synonymous with India’s space programme. In 1963, it was here that Vikram Sarabhai, Homi Bhabha and India’s first space scientists launched the country’s first rocket, kickstarting India’s space dream.

Countless rockets have taken off from its sandy beaches. And generations of villagers have been witness to guests from across the country as well as the whole world. Thumba didn’t just see objects leaving earth for space. A small piece of space also reached its sun-kissed shores. When the Americans brought back pieces of the moon to the earth, they also brought a moon rock to Thumba.

So … how did a fishing hamlet nestled in the southern corner of our country become India’s gateway to space?

Curiously, this story involves, among other things, fishermen, a priest and the Sunday Mass at a church.

From ATS STUDIO, this ⇻ is ⇻ Mission ISRO: a Spotify original podcast about how India reached space.

I am Harsha ⇻ Bhogle.

RECAP

In our previous episode, we looked at how the space race began. In the 1940s and the 50s, the US and the USSR had started their preparation to conquer space. Newly born India was still finding its feet at this time and was far away from this burgeoning space race. Could such a young country dream of starting an ambitious space programme? And should it even do so?

Two Indian scientists Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai seemed to think India should and could aspire towards space. Not to compete in the space race but to harness space technology’s potential for a new country’s development. The question, however, was this: How was India going to do this when the world itself was still figuring it out. Because even in the 1950s, even as the space race was hotting up, no country had yet managed to launch an object, let alone a person into space.

But then came the year 1957 ..

And here we go.

October 4, 1957. Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR.

History was made on this day when the Soviet Union stunned the world by launching the world’s first artificial satellite into space.

The satellite was called Sputnik which means a travelling companion in Russian. It was a rather small travelling companion — the size of a beach ball with four antennae poking out of its exterior. But the impact this miniature and ironically, lone travel companion, had on the world was outsized.

The Soviets had pulled off a magnificent feat.

Did this mean that the Soviets had won the space race?

That’s what the front-page headline of the New York World-Telegram newspaper declared: ‘Russians Win Race Into Space By Launching Man-made Moon’. The Sputnik did look a little like a mini-moon weighing just about 83.6 kgs.

The launch of Sputnik was absolutely unanticipated and sent shockwaves across the globe. Everybody thought it would be America who would launch the first satellite into space. Including America itself.
But they were now feeling the sting quite strongly.

More than ten years of a closely contested space race had culminated into this moment.

Asif Siddiqi
Yeah, I think you know, the the launch of Sputnik which was in October…October 4th, 1957 was a global sensation for a number of reasons. One was, of course, the this was the first time a satellite had been launched into space in all of human history. And as one Russian journalist put it, this was the first time that something was thrown up, and it didn’t come down. And I think it was quite a sensation globally, it was an inspiration to many millions of young people all over the world as an opening of the new frontier in exploration. And there were the publication of thousands of books, magazines, etc, attest to that excitement.

That’s space historian Asif Siddiqi speaking about the impact that Sputnik had. Indeed, its influence on people’s imagination world-wide was quite far-reaching. For one, the number of dogs named Sputnik sky-rocketed across the world.

Asif Siddiqi
There’s a second dimension to it, of course, which is a kind of a Cold War dimension, which is that of course, the Soviets, the Russians had launched this, had done this. And it wasn’t, for example, the Americans, which would have been more obvious, and so there was a kind of shock attached to the excitement that this was somebody who we didn’t expect to do this. And of course, the repeated Soviet successes after that only reinforced that shock. So there’s a kind of global moment. You know, in the US some historians call it – Sputnik, a technological Pearl Harbour. Meaning the attack in World War Two on America in 1941 by the Japanese, it was a similar kind of thing. It was an attack on American confidence. And globally, I think it was seen as a kind of equalisation of superpower status with the Soviets, the Russians are achieving something that was…exceeded the Americans.

Sputnik went into space aboard the R7 rocket developed by the Soviets. R7 was the descendant of the infamous V2 rocket that we heard about in the last episode — one that both the Russians and the Americans rushed to capture.

Sputnik orbited the Earth for three weeks before its batteries died. It continued on for two more months before it fell back into the atmosphere. But the world of course, didn’t stop talking about it for years to come.

Now, even as America was registering its disappointment, back here in India, the mood was the opposite – it was hopeful. The launch of Sputnik inspired many young engineers to gravitate towards space science. We’re even going to meet one such engineer in this episode.

But the most decisive impact of the Sputnik in India was on Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha who were of course watching this global sensation eagerly.

It seemed like the universe had given them a sign. The Soviets had just confirmed to the world that it is possible to send an object to space. It was evidence that Sarabhai and Bhabha had been waiting for. As impossible a dream as it seemed, they knew that it was time for India to begin its long march to space.

The Soviets had launched Sputnik during an international event called the International Geophysical Year or the IGY. This was a year-long event that began in July 1957 and ended in December 1958. The objective was to get countries across the world to conduct a detailed study of the Earth and its planetary environment. 67 countries participated in it and research was divided across 11 fields of geophysics such as aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, glaciology, gravity, ionospheric physics and so on. Research about the sun and the solar cycle was the other focus of the event.

As Vikram Sarabhai’s biographer Amrita Shah points out, the IGY had also come up in response to the world’s growing interest in using satellites for scientific exploration. The idea was to prepare for a time when man himself could eventually venture into space.

Who knew that the Soviets would startle everyone by actually sending a satellite to space!

India also contributed to the IGY and one of the teams that took part in it was none other than scientists from Vikram Sarabhai’s modest two-room laboratory in Ahmedabad – the Physical Research Laboratory.

That’s the thing — and this is something that we’re going to constantly encounter over the course of this podcast. Vikram Sarabhai was a man who was everywhere in a sense — be it on the global stage or the national stage. His magnetism, network, reach and ambition was incredibly impressive.

As you heard in our previous episode, after completing his PhD in Cosmic Rays, Vikram Sarabhai returned to Ahmedabad and set up the Physical Research Laboratory or PRL in 1947. The laboratory was focused on nuclear and cosmic ray physics. Sarabhai convinced Prof. KR Ramanathan who was retiring as the deputy director general of the Indian Meteorological Department to be a part of the leadership at PRL. While Sarabhai was interested in particle physics, Ramanathan was interested in the upper atmosphere and the sun.

Unsurprisingly and within no time, PRL rose in stature in the scientific community in India and became the go-to destination, especially for cosmic rays research. A host of young scientists enrolled to conduct research at PRL. PRL in a sense became like the school that Sarabhai’s parents had set up at their house for their children. The best of the best scientists visited the laboratory.

Pramod Kale
One interesting thing that was there in the Physical Research Laboratory was that Dr. Sarabhai with his connections and other things, quite a large number of scientists from abroad, including some of the nobel laureates also, they were visiting Ahmedabad at the Physical Research Laboratory and we had the opportunity to listen to all these lectures — even by nobel laureates. That was a really fantastic thing to be there.

This is Pramod Kale, one of Sarabhai’s first students at PRL and the Indian scientist who was inspired to venture into space science thanks to Sputnik.

Pramod Kale
In 1957, when the first satellite, Sputnik 1 was launched by USSR in those days, it was really exciting because I was a student in a college in the second year. And that’s the one that really interested me. And whatever I wanted to study about electronics and other things — particularly physics-related things, I decided that that’s the one I’m going to now study further. After completion of my BSc, I was looking at some opportunities, what would be available, and my professor suggested that if you’re interested so much in space and other things, maybe you should go and try to get a meeting with Vikram Sarabhai in Ahmedabad.

Kale’s meeting with Sarabhai ended with him convinced to join PRL. That was that. Little did he know then that he would go on to play a pivotal role in the setting up of the Indian space programme as well.

We’ll follow Kale’s story later. Meanwhile, what’s intriguing to note is that PRL had already become synonymous with space science research in India by the mid-1950s.

Anyway, after Sputnik was launched into space, Sarabhai and Bhabha immediately swung into action. They wanted India, as a country, to formally begin a space programme. But how do two scientists go about setting up a national programme without strong political support? The Government of India needed to be convinced. They needed a political ally but not just any political ally. They needed someone who shared their belief — in using science for the benefit of the country. Someone who could see why India needed to have a space programme.

Here’s where things get interesting again. We’ve talked of Sarabhai’s vast network. But here’s an instance of how Bhabha’s network aided India’s space dream.

One of Homi Bhabha’s closest friends was none other than the Prime Minister himself. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Talk about reach!

Despite the significant age difference between the two men — Nehru was 20 years older — Bhabha and Nehru were the best of friends. Nehru addressed Bhabha as ‘My Dear Homi’ and for Bhabha, Nehru was ‘Bhai’.

There could not have been a better ally for the space programme. Nehru himself had an unwavering faith in science.

Nehru had also said and I quote – “Science alone can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, sanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.”

Under Nehru’s tenure, the first of the five IITs was established and a large number of national laboratories across different fields were set up all over the country.

Nehru liked to surround himself with scientists and researchers. He admired their contribution and believed strongly that it is with their help that a modern nation was to be built.

So, it was in many ways, the friendship of two like-minded individuals who had very similar visions for newly independent India and its path to progress.

In fact, the popular accusation at the time was that Nehru was a little too partial towards Bhabha’s scientific ideas. The Prime Minister had been instrumental in the setting up of both the institute of fundamental research as well as the department of atomic energy — both ventures initiated by Bhabha. He even made Bhabha the scientific policy advisor to the government which basically meant that Bhabha, in effect, decided what scientific programmes and institutions would be set up in the country.

You see where this story is headed now?

With remarkable ease, Bhabha and Sarabhai managed to garner political support for the space programme. And by August 1961, the Prime Minister had given his official consent to the idea. The union government created a department called ‘Space Research and the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space’ and placed it within the jurisdiction of the Department of Atomic Energy which was headed by Bhabha. The government also recognised PRL as the designated centre for research and development in space sciences. Vikram Sarabhai was co-opted into the board of the Atomic Energy Commission.

It was all like clock-work.

Fate intervened in favour of India even in the world. Serendipity, like I said in the previous episode, was the Indian space programme’s most loyal partner.

In 1960, still embittered by the Soviets gaining a headstart in the space race, America’s governmental space programme the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA announced that it was open for international collaboration. NASA had been established in 1958, almost a year after Sputnik went into space. In his writings, Asif Siddiqi points out that when the Congress in America established NASA, they decided that one of its principal goals would be cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations.

This was also a clear Cold-War strategy – to ensure that countries align themselves with the US and not the USSR.

Anyway, when NASA announced that it is opening its doors for collaboration, many countries across the world raised their hand in response. India too was one among them and very unsurprisingly, it was Vikram Sarabhai who was knocking on NASA’s doors.

Asif Siddiqi
Sarabhai’s there and saying, look, we like…we find this offer quite interesting by NASA and we want to talk. And so he comes to Washington, DC in May 1961. And he comes armed with two proposals. He says we want to build a rocket launching station in India. And number two, we want to build a tracking station to communicate with satellites. Already, I think these are very smart things to think about.

So, Sarabhai was basically asking NASA to collaborate with India and help us build a sounding rocket station in India. This was a very modest project and perfect for a young country trying to start a space programme.

A sounding rocket is actually a research rocket. The origin of the word ‘sounding’ comes from the nautical term ‘to sound’. In rocket terms this would translate as ‘to measure’. So, essentially, that’s what a sounding rocket is used for — it goes up into the earth’s atmosphere and conducts experiments. As Pramod Kale explains here.

Pramod Kale
Whenever we wanted to understand something about the upper atmosphere for the meteorology purposes, we were sending those simple hydrogen-filled balloons. The balloons would rise up, up to a height of about at the most 10000 feet or so. Going beyond that required much larger sizes of the balloons. But these balloons finally cannot go beyond about say 30 kilometres or so — beyond that there was no way of getting the information. One of the ways of getting the information was to send a radar signal and try to get the echo. But if we want to take the measurements right in the atmosphere at a particular height, then the only way we can reach there is through a rocket and because it started as a sounding echo and all other thing-kind of a thing, people started calling them as sounding rockets. That was the basic idea behind these particular rockets — that they would go up to any specific height and take the measurements right there itself particularly regarding the temperature and the pressure — these two things were initially being measured.

Sarabhai had another reason for this idea and that had to do with both his and Bhabha’s favourite subject of study: Cosmic Rays.

Cosmic rays are fragments of atoms that move at the speed of light from various stars and galaxies across space. They rain down on Earth and as they strike the earth’s upper atmosphere, they are dispersed by the Earth’s magnetic field and disintegrate into secondary particles, some of which reach the Earth’s surface.

A number of aspects of these rays were unknown for a long time and physicists from all over the world were engaged in deciphering them. In fact, the scattering of these rays was calculated in the 1930s in Cambridge. And the student who did that was none other than Homi J. Bhabha. The calculation was even called Bhabha scattering.

Anyway, the problem was that studying the cosmic rays from the ground or even through balloons floating up was pretty difficult. Generally, cosmic rays were measured through specialised photographic plates here on earth or close to the earth’s surface. There were a number of interferences that hampered this measurement.

But as Siddiqi points out again, India offered a unique solution to this difficulty. India had a geographical advantage: The magnetic equator passed through India and it made the measurement of cosmic rays far easier.

Hold on. What’s the magnetic equator?

The earth’s magnetic field, among many other things, enables compasses to align with it and point north or South. However, if you imagine the earth as a flat map, the earth’s magnetic field is not in neat, straight lines like latitudes and longitudes are. Instead, it varies in angles – called inclination – and intensity. Magnetic lines twist and turn around this map – causing the tip of the plain compass to bend downwards near the Arctic or upwards near the Antartic. This “dip” in the compass needle is called a magnetic dip and compass manufacturers for centuries have been calibrating compass needles to negate the effects of the dip.

However, there is a magnetic line with Zero dip. A compass here would align perfectly with the earth’s magnetic field. This is called the magnetic equator.

While India may be 1,000km from the earth’s equator, it is fortunate that the magnetic equator does not follow this path. The Magnetic equator curves from below the earth’s equator in South America to slightly above the equator in Africa, before kissing the Southern tip of mainland India.

And at the magnetic equator, it is relatively easier to study cosmic rays and a number of other phenomena.

This is why, even prior to India’s independence, scientists like Robert A Millikan, the nobel prize winner who actually coined the world cosmic rays visited India to carry out his experiments here. And guess who else was also involved in this — both Bhabha and Sarabhai. As Siddiqi argues in his writings, it is perhaps no accident that Sarabhai’s choice of subject for research was Cosmic Rays. PRL too, as we know, was dedicated to Cosmic Rays research.

And, it is no accident that Sarabhai goes to NASA with a proposal to collaborate near the magnetic equator. Sarabhai knew that India could offer to fill up the gaps in the study of cosmic rays and other intriguing phenomena in the upper atmosphere purely because of its advantageous location.

The entire plan was also remarkable for a third reason. If a sounding rocket station is established in India, then scientists from all over the world could come and study a variety of phenomena by blasting off rockets from a site near the magnetic equator. Which meant that India could play host to space-related activities and learn from that.

The other proposal Sarabhai gave NASA was to establish a satellite tracking station in India. We’ll talk about this a little later in the podcast.

So, anyway, Sarabhai presents these two proposals and then in November 1960, Bhabha makes a trip to NASA. Again, it’s incredible how well-connected both Sarabhai and Bhabha were with scientists and collaborators across the world. Their individual contribution in academia was also well known. So, when Bhabha went to NASA, he was given a very grand welcome.

Siddiqi writes that Bhabha visited several facilities of NASA including their sounding rocket launch site at Wallops Island in Virginia. During his trip, Bhabha reiterated Sarabhai’s proposal and even urged NASA to help India by providing rockets which was tricky because this was not a technology that was easily shared during the Cold War. Space rockets after all had military origins. So there was always a lingering fear of countries using rocket technology to bolster their missile programmes.

But finally, by May 1962, NASA had agreed to Sarabhai’s proposal. There were clear terms of course. A joint sounding rocket project would be implemented, NASA would provide the rockets as well as the training for Indian scientists. Meanwhile, India would assemble the equipment for the experiments, put together a team of scientists who would operate that equipment and of course offer the most crucial of them all: a perfect launch site near the magnetic equator.

The same year, the Department of Atomic Energy created a space committee for India: the Indian National Committee for Space Research or INCOSPAR. No prizes for guessing that the chairman of this committee was Vikram Sarabhai. The objective of this committee was to oversee all space research and activities in India.

In other words, the space programme had formally begun in India and within the next year, a rocket could potentially be launched from India.

However, for a rocket to actually take off from Indian soil, Sarabhai and team would have to scramble to find a site and convert it into a rocket launching station as quickly as possible.

The ideal site had to be found, and found soon.

While all this hectic bureaucratic activity was happening in 1962 in America, New Delhi and Ahmedabad, down south in Kerala, in a sleepy town called Thumba, Reverend Father Peter Bernard Pereira, was getting ready to deliver the Sunday sermon.

The 45-year-old priest was the bishop of the St Mary Magdalene Church, one of the prime landmarks of the town.

The church actually has an interesting backstory. According to Indian Catholic Matters, an online publication, the original church was founded in a thatched hut in 1544. Sometime in the early 20th century, work began on building a new church in its place, and the architects and sculptors came from the nearby state of Tamil Nadu.

As work progressed, some fishermen happened to spot a statue of St. Mary Magdalene on the sea shore. Strangely, a wooden pole had also been washed ashore along with the statue. And soon, the statue was blessed and consecrated in the church. The pole was erected as a flag mast in front of the church.

It was all quite idyllic — the church, the Bishop’s house, the sleepy town of Thumba and the sea.

But this scene of calm would soon be punctuated with a knock on the Bishop’s door.

It was a man who had come there to ask him if he could vacate his house and if the church could be vacated too.

Vikram Sarabhai had come to Thumba.

But before I tell you more about that, let’s go back to Ahmedabad.

In order to find a suitable location for the launch of the sounding rockets, Sarabhai decided to send one of his most trusted students and scientists at PRL, to conduct a recce of southern India.

E.V Chitnis
I was born on July 25, 1935 So, this year I will be 95.

This is EV Chitnis, also known as Vikram Sarabhai’s right-hand man, a Padma Bhushan awardee and one of ISRO’s founding members.

Chitnis joined PRL in 1952, barely a few years after the laboratory had been founded.

E.V Chitnis
I….actually was selected for the post of engineer in all india radio, class one job, but I didn’t want it. I wanted to do research. So, I told Vikram Sarabhai that I have this offer of…, I was selected by UPSC… Union union Public Service Commission on the job after an interview in Delhi. So, I showed that letter of appointment to Vikram Sarabhai and said I’m not joining.

To study at PRL, Chitnis needed a scholarship but PRL couldn’t afford to give him one at that time. So he worked as a lecturer for a term in a small town in Gujarat while PRL arranged a fellowship of one hundred rupees.

Chitnis immersed himself in research at PRL – setting up a scintillation counter array to detect cosmic ray showers. Researchers at PRL, Chitnis says, would spend all their time at PRL but not always because they loved research.

E.V Chitnis
We had hostels in which there were no fans and Ahmedabad was such a hot 45-46 degrees temperature. So we spend all our time in PRL only (laughs) because there were fans and we could work there.

When Sarabhai decided to officially start the space programme, Chitnis was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston on their invitation which was another testament to the talent that PRL produced.

E.V Chitnis
Then Vikram Sarabhai called me and said Chitnis, we should start space research in India. And you come back. So when I told my colleagues in MIT that I’m going back, they said, they asked what are you going to do.

MIT researchers actually laughed when Chitnis told them that India was going to start its own space programme.

E.V Chitnis
They said India cannot feed (the word feed is not clear) its own population and they are borrowing wheat from USA. Why are you looking at all this space research.

‘Feed your country first’ was their response.

E.V Chitnis
So, I said our space research is not like American space research with the aim of going to the moon and all that, our space research will be full of applications and communications and remote sensing and very practical programmes where space technology will be a formidable tool to accelerate the development.

One phone call from Sarabhai was enough to convince Chitnis to leave MIT and return to India to join the efforts towards a space programme that was yet to take off.

And once Chitnis returned, Sarabhai immediately set him on a mission to find a location near the magnetic equator from where India could launch sounding rockets.

Sarabhai himself drove Chitnis to the airport as he left for the ambitious trip.

Was Chitnis nervous? Worried about not being able to find a good enough location?

E.V Chitnis
No, you know, when you’re a scientist, all these things have ration… You work on rationality, you don’t work on emotions. So I suppose, certain choices are made and their success will determine that the choices were right. Whose choices it was is not very important. It is the programme that has to go ahead. So, the work culture is quite different in space. And that comes out of science. If you’re a scientist, you naturally argue rationally not emotionally.

Chitnis conducted a thorough survey of prospective locations and finally shortlisted a few options — All of them in Kerala, ideal for their proximity to the magnetic equator.

Since this was a programme that had the government’s support, there was quite a bit of curiosity about which location would be finally selected.

The choice eventually came down to two: Quillon (Koi-lon), which is today called Kollam and Thumba, a small fishing hamlet. Both, close to Thiruvananthapuram.

E.V Chitnis
You have to take into account.. you must have open space, you have to see how much population you will displace, you have to find out houses and compensation for them by the government of kerala and government of india. All kinds of administrative, financial, and problems were involved in that.

Proximity to an airport and potential land to house scientists and their families were the other considerations.

Once Chitnis shortlisted the locations, Sarabhai and Bhabha came to Kerala. A fleet of cars greeted the two men at the airport as they landed in Thiruvananthapuram. Chitnis then arranged for a Dakota plane so that the two scientists could survey the locations from the sky.

E.V Chitnis
“Yes, from Cochin, you know by that time, .. you know in those days, the planes were small — 25-30 peop…passengers, Dakotas. So..and I had flown several times to Trivandrum. So I had come to know these pilots — so I told pilot that he should..I would like to show the sites…from Cochin to Trivandrum, you fly low so that I can point out to Dr. Bhabha – the sites and he can see them aerially. He agreed and he asked his co-pilot to sit back and put Bhabha in his seat. And I was standing between the two. So, on the way, Bhabha could see all the sites at one go.”

In her book Amrita Shah writes about a photograph that is taken from this time and during this mission. I quote, “There is Bhabha, a trifle portly with thick-framed glasses in a short-sleeved safari suit pointing into the distance. Vikram, in a shirt with sleeves rolled up and light trousers, follows Bhabha’s pointed finger. Behind them the tall, proud palm trees rise into a clear sky.”

The final choice was made in favour of Thumba, partly because of its proximity to the airport but also because it would mean displacing a relatively smaller population than Quillon.

The journey to the starting point of India’s space programme was finally nearing completion. After having convinced the Americans and then the Indian government, the challenge in front of Sarabhai and Bhabha was to convince the local fishermen of Thumba that a space programme was indeed necessary.

Would the fishermen of Thumba be persuaded to move out of their huts and give their land up for a programme that they had never heard of or even understand? Sarabhai met many politicians and bureaucrats to seek their help in convincing the fishermen of Thumba.

There are varying versions of the story from here on. Some say that the government said it will displace people even by force if necessary. And it was Vikram Sarabhai who asked them not to use force. Some others say that even the bureaucrats weren’t successful in persuading the fishermen. According to an article in ozy.com, the local government officials of Thumba were given 24 hours to study the space programme proposal and a 100 days to hand over the site to the central government. The then district collector of Thumba, Madhavan Nair, reportedly said and I quote: “Of all the cases of land acquisition I had to deal with in my tenure as district collector, that associated with the Rocket Launching Station at Thumba proved to be the most difficult.”

But, finally, the matter seems to have reached the church and its Bishop — Father Bernard Pereira. In his mid-40s, most people remember Father Pereira as a smiling, bespectacled man who had played a major role in boosting the finances of the Trivandrum diocese. Father Pereira had also played a role in the Vimochana Samaram movement that eventually brought down the communist government in Kerala. His words carried weight among his parishioners.

It was a Saturday when Sarabhai met Father Pereira. The Bishop listened to Sarabhai’s detailed proposal and then said

Padmanabh Joshi
So Bishop, after knowing, he said Dr. Sarabhai, please I understand your point but please you come tomorrow morning, because we are going to have prayer and all the people, all the fishermen who are staying, they will all be there. So, in their presence we’ll discuss this thing and I will talk to them also.”

This is Padmanabh Joshi, author and organiser of the archives of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai at Nehru Foundation for Development, Ahmedabad. Joshi’s doctoral thesis was also on Vikram Sarabhai.

Padmanabh Joshi
“So next day, everybody came and there was about 1-2 hours prayers was there and everything was over, then Bishop said that I would like to tell you something and I will also like to introduce you to a friend of mine.

What followed was pretty dramatic.

The Indian Catholic Matters magazine describes that Sunday in church in exquisite detail:

And I’m going to read out the relevant portions to you:

The Bishop told the congregation, “My children, I have a famous scientist with me who wants our church and the place I live for the work of space science research. Dear children, science seeks the truth that enriches human life. The higher level of religion is spirituality. The spiritual preachers like me, seek the help of the Almighty to bring peace to human minds. In short, what Vikram is doing and what I am doing are the same – both science and spirituality seek the Almighty’s blessings for human prosperity in mind and body. Vikram Sarabhai promises within six months, our abode and church will be newly built and given to us. Children, can we give them God’s abode, my abode and your abode for a scientific mission??”

Silence reigned in the church for a bit.

A loud Amen came from the congregation finally.

Credits

Narrated by – Harsha Bhogle
Producer – Gaurav Vaz
Research & Interviews – Archana Nathan
Written by – Archana Nathan & Nupur Pai
Narrative overview – Sidin Vadukut & Devaiah Bopanna
Editing – Gaurav Vaz & Supriya Nair
Transcription – Anushka Mukherjee

Title Track, Sound Design, Background Score – Raghu Dixit
Audio Prouduction Assitance – Suraj Gulvady
Audio Engineering Support & Editing – Madhav Ayachit
Recorded at Island City Studios, Mumbai by – Supratik Das