Aryabhata

One of the first projects that Dr. Satish Dhawan has to steer to success is the building and launch of India’s first satellite. The man in-charge of the project is a young and ambitious scientist and engineer called Dr. UR Rao. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is lenient with funds. The USSR too is keen on helping our scientists but on the condition that it sets a record. The question is if we can pull off such an ambitious project.

Show Notes

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

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

• Surendra Pal

We thank our narrators who stepped in to re-create some of the sections in the episode

• UR Rao’s book sections were narrated by Gaurav Vaz

References

• 1970 – China’s first Satellite Launch – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_g_La6os90
• The East is Red – The Chinese Anthem played from Space – https://twitter.com/cctv/status/856713097175748608

Full Transcript of Episode 8

The song that you just heard – “The East is Red”, was the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. 

On the night of April 24, 1970, this song was played from space for the first time. All thanks to China’s first satellite ‘Dongfanghong – the first’, which carried a small radio transmitter along with it to space. The name Donfanghong itself means ‘East is Red’. 

With this launch, China became the fifth country in the world to launch a satellite, joining the Soviet Union, the United States, France and Japan in this honour.

But the achievement that the Chinese were more proud of was the fact that they had managed to launch the heaviest satellite among all countries. The Chinese satellite reportedly weighed 173 kgs, more than double the weight of Sputnik.

April 1971. Exactly one year later.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi calls Vikram Sarabhai and gives him a letter that she had received from Dr. DP Dhar, the Indian Ambassador to Moscow. The letter said that the Soviets were keen to help India in its space activities. In fact, the Soviets were interested in helping India launch its first satellite. 

There was only one condition though. 

India’s satellite had to be heavier than China’s. 

From ATS Studio, this is Mission I-S-R-O, a Spotify original podcast about how India reached space.

I’m Harsha Bhogle.

Recap

In the previous episode, I introduced you to Vikram Sarabhai’s successor at ISRO: Dr. Satish Dhawan. A Bangalore-based Punjabi aeronautics engineer with a double doctorate from Caltech, Satish Dhawan was the youngest director of the Indian Institute of Science in 1962. A key member of the scientific elite in India, he was also a member of INCOSPAR and had kept in touch with the progress of the space programme. 

When Vikram Sarabhai passed away all of a sudden in 1971, Dhawan was at Caltech on a teaching sabbatical. The Prime Minister asked him if he would consider returning to India to take charge of the space programme. Dhawan mulled over the idea and finally said yes three months later. But he had a few conditions. He wanted to continue as the director of IISC and so, he wanted the space programme to move from Thumba to Bangalore. The Prime Minister agreed. 

When Dhawan took charge of ISRO, there were three immediate tasks that demanded his attention: the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment or SITE, the satellite launch vehicle or the SLV-3 project and finally, the building and launch of India’s first satellite, Aryabhata.

Let’s begin with the story of the last one on that list.

Here we go

The story of Aryabhata begins sometime in late 1968. Vikram Sarabhai asks one of his students UR Rao to draw up a plan for the development of satellite technology in India. Rao writes about this in detail in his book ‘India’s Rise As A Space Power’.

As requested, Rao comes up with an elaborate report on how India can go about developing satellite technology. Sarabhai looks at it and says, “It’s very fine except for one thing. You have not mentioned who will lead the satellite programme.” Rao replied that that was for Sarabhai to decide. 

Sarabhai promptly chose Rao for the job but the answer he got in return was an outright no. Rao had by then committed to teaching a few semesters at the South West Centre at Dallas Texas. He felt that taking on the onus of the satellite programme in India was too big a responsibility. But Sarabhai didn’t give up. He continued to coax Rao for almost a year and finally, in 1969, Rao agreed. 

What UR Rao did not know back then was that in a few years, he would be known to crores of Indians as the Satellite Man of India.

Hailing from a small village called Adamaru near Udupi in Karnataka, Udupi Ramachandra Rao was persuaded by Sarabhai to join PRL when he was teaching Physics in Mysuru. Soft-spoken and ambitious, Rao was one of Sarabhai’s oldest students and therefore, among India’s earliest space pioneers. Rao would even go on to head ISRO after Satish Dhawan retired.

Anyway, back in 1969, after he officially took on the mantle of the satellite programme in India, UR Rao assembled a team of about 20 engineers. Their first task was to begin work on the design of India’s first satellite.

However, the question on their minds was this: how was India going to launch the satellite when we were still trying to build our own launch vehicle? If you remember, we had only built our own rockets up until this point. 

A satellite is quite simply an object that is in orbit around a planet. The moon, for instance, is a natural satellite for it orbits the earth. A man-made object that is put in orbit is an artificial satellite, much like what India was trying to build back in early 1970. This tiny object can be designed and built to collect data and conduct experiments – becoming a proverbial eye in the sky.

However, for any satellite to go up to space, it needs a launch vehicle – a powerful rocket that can escape earth’s gravity. So far, India had seen success only with sounding rockets launched from Thumba. Those rockets could go up to 55km above the earth’s surface, but would inevitably fall back down. India hadn’t yet mastered the technology needed to build a rocket that could go to space.

So, Rao and his team studied the options in front of them and it was finally decided that a satellite weighing about 100 kilograms would be built and it would be launched on an American rocket called Scout which wasn’t very expensive to buy or lease at that time.

If you remember, back when the space programme had just started, a group of space scientists and engineers had gone to NASA to be trained. Among these was Abdul Kalam and he had studied the Scout rocket extensively. 

While Rao was focussed on getting India’s first satellite going, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi received the letter from the Indian Ambassador at Moscow, DP Dhar. The Soviets wanted to help India. Vikram Sarabhai was quick to jump at the offer. He felt that the Soviets could help India build and launch its first satellite. So, a month later, a meeting was arranged with them in Delhi. Soviet Ambassador to India, Nikolai Pegov attended the meeting.

Rao writes about this meeting in detail in his book and he says it reads like fiction! It sure does.

Narrator
After the initial briefing by Vikram, I was required to present technical details of the satellite being designed and the type of launch vehicle we need for launching the satellite. After patiently hearing me for nearly 30 minutes, the first question Ambassador Pegov asked me was the weight of the first satellite launched by the Chinese. On hearing that it weighed around 190 kg, Ambassador Pegov told us that the first Indian Satellite must be heavier than the first Chinese one and the Soviet Union was ready to launch it for us whatever be its weight.

What exactly was going on here?

The Cold War seemed to be playing its part again in the Indian space programme. 

Let’s take a break from space science and head a bit into the history pages.

Soon after the second World War, the communist forces led by Mao Zedung took over mainland China. Mao and Joseph Stalin, who was the head of Soviet Russia, had similar styles of functioning and similar ideologies. However, after Stalin’s death, the USSR started to veer away from the personality-cult rule of Stalinism and sought to peacefully coexist with the West. Mao felt that this was a betrayal of the Communist Marxist-Leninist ideology. This led to what is called the Sino-Soviet split – a series of hostilities that stretched for over 20 years between the USSR and China.

India had lost territory to China in the 1962 war, and so, for the USSR, India was arguably, a natural ally to keep the power balance in the region.

So, this brings us back to the meeting in Delhi in May 1971. And gives it ample context as well.

Politically, India had good relations with the USSR and it wanted to maintain that. But as far as India’s space scientists were concerned, they seemed to not be thinking about competing with China but were just interested in making the most of this opportunity that the Soviets had brought with them. This collaboration would give Indian space scientists the experience of building and launching its own satellite — all from scratch. It was an exciting opportunity.

Immediately after the meeting with the Russians in Delhi, Rao and his team drew up the conceptual design of a 360 kg satellite, a little more than double the weight of the Chinese satellite. And this satellite was planning to carry three scientific payloads in it. As you know, payloads often comprise scientific instruments that help scientists conduct experiments in space. 

Sarabhai ensured that the experiments that India’s first satellite would conduct were carefully chosen. An international committee of distinguished scientists was appointed and after extensive discussions, they chose experiments in X-ray astronomy, a gamma ray experiment, and experiments in aeronomy where the satellite will study the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere. 

Alright. Once the conceptual design of the satellite was ready, Rao, along with a team of three scientists, travelled to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow for a meeting.

And here comes the first twist in the story. In his book, Rao writes that the Soviet scientists weren’t fully convinced that India could pull off such an ambitious project. The Soviets argued that perhaps India should first master the building of payloads and think about building satellites later.

Narrator
The Soviet team tried their best to convince us that the most prudent course for us would be to fly a scientific payload in one of the Soviet satellites. I argued our case for launching a totally Indian built satellite on a Soviet rocket carrier to assist us in establishing satellite technology capability in India. 

Three days of heated debates followed. And finally, the Soviets agreed to launch an Indian-built satellite from their cosmodrome for free! This was an incredible display of confidence and persuasive power from our Indian scientists.

Surendra Pal
See, Professor Sarabhai was a true nationalist, okay. He wanted everything to be done in India.

Here is Surendra Pal, a former ISRO scientist who worked on the Aryabhata project.

Surendra Pal
So, the confidence of the team came from the confidence of the leaders. You know, one thing I mean, I always quote it that, when a war takes place, maximum persons who die are youngsters, you know. They have got that enthusiasm, what you call “josh”. So that sort of thing was there – we were all youngsters, we wanted to do something.

By August 1971, just a few months after the first meeting in Delhi, the Soviets had agreed to collaborate with India, at least in principle. But before they signed on the dotted line, the Soviets wanted to visit India one more time by the end of that year to review India’s facilities and infrastructure.

But December brought bad news that year – Vikram Sarabhai was no more. Rao was heartbroken. 

The Soviets eventually arrived in India in February 1972. MGK Menon was the interim chief of ISRO at that time. And so, it fell on him to finalise the terms of the deal with the Soviets. Menon seemed a little uncertain about the project. Were we going to be able to do this, he asked Rao. 

Narrator
“My reply was that if we want to go into space and use space technology for national development, this is the best opportunity we have.”

Rao’s idea was that once India mastered the building of a basic satellite, it could build on that knowledge and go on to build more sophisticated ones in the future. A beginning had to be made somewhere!

Meanwhile the Prime Minister wanted to know how much it was going to cost the Indian government to build this satellite. 3 crores was the team’s answer. Indira Gandhi immediately approved the budget and even offered to give more money if it was necessary.

Surendra Pal
You see getting 3-4 crores in the 1975 –today you may get 30,000 crores from Modiji. Getting three crores was difficult, we were in a poor country at the time. So, Mrs. Gandhi’s contribution is quite a lot in this direction. 

3 crores in 1972 is equal to 120 crores today!

Under Menon’s leadership, the agreement was finally signed and the launch date was fixed as 1974, two years from then.

India’s first satellite was going to be built in the shape of an oblate spheroid – mimicking the shape of the earth and other planets. It would have 26 faces made up of solar panels.

Rao writes that as per the Soviet agreement, India was in-charge of the design, fabrication, preparation and testing of the satellite as well as the scientific experiments. The Soviets were giving us a free launch of course but along with that they also agreed to give us solar panels, battery and a tape recorder, among other things.

Interestingly, India’s first satellite wasn’t built in Thumba but in makeshift sheds of the Peenya industrial estate in Bengaluru. It isn’t quite clear why the project moved out of Thumba. In his book, Rao writes that since Bangalore had access to a number of industries, he felt that it was the most suitable place to start the satellite programme.

But the decision would not come without its controversy. Satish Dhawan had placed the shifting of ISRO headquarters to Bangalore as one of his conditions for taking over as Director of ISRO. When the Department of Space was created, it too was headquartered in Bangalore. Thumba, which was India’s centre for rocketry, was being sidelined and this created a huge controversy in the state of Kerala. They were strongly against the satellite programme moving to Bangalore.

Surendra Pal
They didn’t want satellite activities to go out because there was an apprehension that employment will not be there, you’ve to go to Karnataka. Satellite activity will be independent of others. The big bosses there were not involved in it. They were not consulted. These are my personal feelings, you know. They cannot be official versions. So the maybe they felt, they must have told others that this is what happened, they must have told management also.

Finally, a Parliamentary assurance had to be given – that after the launch of the satellite, the team would return to Thumba.

Surendra Pal
But so there was, I suppose there was an assurance given in the parliament when the question went by parties in the parliament that this is only for the — to meet the time schedule and so on —  later on, all activities will be brought back. And for a long time, the Rohini satellite activities were kept in Trivandrum. So, that we said that no, the satellite activities, we have not wound up. Only Aryabhatta activities we are taking. Rohini satellite which was launched from the SLV, those activities were kept there. 

The opposition in Kerala was so stiff that even equipment for the satellite programme could not be brought from Kerala to Bangalore. Rao writes that it was Satish Dhawan who eventually helped the satellite team procure all the material they needed for the project from elsewhere.

Narrator: We went to France, UK and a few cities in USA staying a day or two at each place meeting heads of various industries. We had the complete power to make decisions on the spot and issue purchase orders for equipment and components after negotiation with industries.

Surendra Pal says some equipment was smuggled out of Thumba as well.

Surendra Pal
Let me tell you we all brought it, slowly. See it was never brought in trucks, it was bought by engineers. I brought my that admittance base which I’m talking about it, many components, many systems from their books, etc everything I got it, it as a personal luggage.

After all, no organisation is devoid of politics.

It helped that ISRO’s new successor Satish Dhawan was a man who knew how to handle flaring tempers, incompatible teams and infighting within the organisation. Most ISRO scientists remember him as a man who patiently and often quietly ironed out any difficulties that they faced. He wasn’t fond of the limelight but would step up in the event of a storm. 

The Thumba storm eventually tided over and the satellite team began their work in Bangalore. 

While Bangalore was able to give the space programme access to industries, it wasn’t a perfect site for a new programme.  When UR Rao came to pick a spot in the city for the programme, he settled for four sheds in the Peenya industrial estate, each measuring an area of 5000 square feet. 

Surendra Pal
In the in the rainy season, monsoon It used to rain heavily in Bangalore at the time. It was… in the morning it will rain, evening it will rain. So we used to put two bricks in hand, put one brick jump or they, put another brick jump over it, to pass that the slush, you know.

It was Thumba all over again. Rudimentary facilities, less than ideal working conditions but that didn’t deter our scientists.

Surendra Pal
Will you visualise, visualise, visualise the 1970 our economic conditions, our government conditions – first thing. Second thing is do you remember that what Professor Homi Bhabha, Dr. Homi Bhabha used to say? Atomic Energy started in the Second World War barracks. Later on, buildings were made.  

You can’t wait for the building, you lose that much time in developing the technology. 

UR Rao writes that the hallmark of the team in Peenya was a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm. They seemed to be marching into the unknown undeterred and with complete confidence. Listen in to what Surendra Pal had to say when he was asked what the most challenging part of building India’s satellite was —

Surendra Pal
I won’t say, biggest challenge. I will say what was the biggest passion, passion was to make a satellite and show the public that we can also make it. Although we are not from a — none of us were trained abroad. There must be 2-3 persons including Professor Rao who must have seen.. abroad. We never went abroad. We were local colleges person. I came from Pilani, somebody came from IIT. Somebody came from IRC, somebody came from local engineering college, it was like that. So that was a passion.  

Challenge is only this making the whole satellite was a challenge. We never saw a satellite.  I told you I never saw a communication system working. I never saw an antenna system except the radio and big antenna. So all those things were a thing. Also books are good to provide a path. But using books, textbooks, nobody can make anything. Then we were thinking out of box you know, ISRO allowed you to think out of box. 

India’s first satellite was built using local industry and technicians, even local welders. 

Pal remembers one incident when our engineers decided to use locally available aluminium as one of the materials in the satellite. The question on their minds was will it degrade in space? 

Pal was promptly sent off to the library in IISC where he found out that aluminium in high vacuum does degrade but only by a few microns. So, he came back to Rao and told him that they could go ahead and use it.

Surendra Pal
So, these were the doubts which used to come to us, what will happen in space, how things will get degraded, whether the things will fly off, you know. They were stupid doubts, but they were the doubts on which whole space technology in India flourished.

The India team’s interaction with the Soviets was quite limited. Every six months, there would be a review meeting. 

The agreement had anyway only specified the transfer of some basic technology and a free launch of the final satellite. But there was another reason why the Indians tended to maintain a safe distance from the Soviets —

Surendra Pal
But they did not offer any training, no literature was given by them and a personal level also, we could not get anything from them because they were scared that there will be a KGB agent. So, in the big team of Russians, couple of them used to be KGB agents. My friend, my counterpart one Professor Variyudin was  there. So, he told me, no, we should not — he used speak a little bit of English — we should not speak you know, that person may be a KGB agent, that person may be KGB agent. That was the thing.

Well, this was the Cold War era, after all.

I don’t know if some of you remember seeing this one photograph, a black and white photograph that captures the test flight of India’s first satellite. It is a strange photograph. 

A helicopter flies through the clear skies above Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh and a small spherical object with antennae poking out of it hangs by a rope. From the ground, it looks like a water tank is being carried in air to be airdropped and installed somewhere. 

But this was the working model of India’s first satellite being flown on a test flight. The idea was to see if the satellite is able to send signals from far away — if its telemetry, telecommand and communication links were working.

Before this test flight, our space engineers had made another small satellite model and put into a balloon and released that into the skies. Our space scientists did not have a ground station or antenna systems at that time. But, they managed to create a makeshift antenna system for that test flight.

It was jugaad all the way. Two months before the launch date, UR Rao felt that they needed another back-up ground station apart from the one in Sriharikota. A ground station is quite simply the site which tracks the satellite, receives the signals and the data that it sends. There was one in Sriharikota already but Rao wanted one more in Bangalore. So they actually converted two toilets behind the sheds in Peenya into a full-fledged ground station!

Yes, you heard that right.

Anyway, by the end of 1974, the launch date had been pushed by a few more months. It was now scheduled for April, 1975. 

A month before the scheduled launch, our scientists realised that our satellite still had no name. Extensive discussions began between the government and the scientists. There were three names that were the prime contenders: Jawahar, meaning the spirit of independence, Maitri, referring to the friendship between India and the USSR and Aryabhata, the name of India’s first astronomer. 

It was up to Indira Gandhi to choose the name. And when everyone thought, she’d choose Jawhar for quite obvious reasons, she chose Aryabhata. 

If you remember from previous episodes, India’s first rocket launch was a quiet affair. Nearly 12 years later, ISRO had clearly captured the imagination of the people and the government. Commemorative stamps were printed to be released on the launch date. It was a big deal. 

Now, all eyes were on the launch itself.

19 April, 1975. It was a bright shiny day at the Kapustin Yar Cosmodrome near Volgograd in Russia. A sprawling site. Before it became a cosmodrome, Kapustin Yar was known as the site where the Soviets tested their ballistic missiles. 

Standing at the launchpad, UR Rao had butterflies in his stomach. Around 30 scientists from India including Satish Dhawan and Surendra Pal had travelled to Russia for the launch. Matching their excitement in equal measure, ISRO scientists in India were huddled at the ground stations in Bangalore and Sriharikota.

The final countdown began around noon. 

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . Payyakali

Payyakali in Russian means “let us go” or “here we go”. The phrase had become popular in the USSR after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space uttered it right before his sojourn to space.

At the appointed time, the Intercosmos rocket carrying Aryabhata had taken off towards the skies. Eyes and heartbeats followed it closely as it shot up with incredible speed. 

Surendra Pal
You see first is when the…first we’re starting to see where the rocket is going. It made a big sound, you know, like a much louder than the roaring of a tiger on a lion, okay. We could see that it’s going we were not very far away, maybe a few kilometres away from that place. We were in the open, we have had some, some of us had binoculars, we were seeing through binoculars. 

Twelve minutes after the rocket reached the skies, the last stage of the rocket started its preparation to place Aryabhata in its designated orbit at a height of around 600 kilometres above the earth’s surface. Rao writes: For the Indian scientists the drama had just begun. They had to wait for a few more minutes to receive the first telemetry signals from the satellite confirming that all was well with Aryabhata.

And then, a Russian official told UR Rao that a Soviet ship-borne station had received signals from Aryabhata but Rao was told to not announce this to his Indian team. Not yet, at least.The ground stations both in Moscow and in India were yet to receive the confirmation. 

And then, it happened.

Surendra Pal
When the first signal came, we showed it to Professor Rao, Dhawan. Professor Rao became very emotional and he was emotionally choked. He hugged each one of us. And then Professor Dhawan came, he also congratulated. 

And we were all on the ninth cloud, you know. We had launched the satellite. We have launched the satellite. 

India had taken its first giant step in space by sending a small but special spherical emissary. What was considered near-impossible just a few years ago had been accomplished.

But…

Yes, it was indeed too good to be true because four days after Aryabhata reached space, it suffered an electrical failure which halted all the scientific experiments that the Aryabhata had hoped to conduct. It was a disappointment that our scientists hadn’t anticipated. But it didn’t affect the joy, solace and pride that they felt for having built and launched India’s first satellite in space. Aryabhata, even with its power failure, remained in orbit for nearly 17 years. 

But the legacy it left behind was immeasurable. In its icy isolation in space, Aryabhata would see many, many launches from ISRO as its space programme reached greater heights.

The Aryabhata laid the foundation for all the satellites that India would build henceforth. It gave ISRO the confidence that India could now build not just basic but even attempt sophisticated satellites.

The launch would cement U.R.’s moniker as the satellite man of India; while Dhawan’s leadership during this time would rest all doubts that he was a more than an able successor to Sarabhai. A year after Aryabhatta’s launch, the sheds in Peenya would eventually be transformed into the U.R. Rao Satellite Centre becoming the hub of activity that would contribute significantly to India’s development.

Surendra Pal
You know, that what you call, pleasure and the anand, which you say —  pleasure I can’t say. Anand is the proper thing you know which is a Indian word; Hindi, or Sanskrit word–  was tremendous. I mean you can’t get — I mean, I got ranks etc, I got gold medal this that. Never got that sort of Anand that came after launching Aryabhata. And after that so many satellites were launched. We never felt that happy, even though we were always happy. But that elation or if it elated and … you can’t … I can’t describe that moment you know.