Computer put a hold, don’t launch it!

After Aryabhata and SITE, there was one ambitious project that remained: the design, building and launch of India’s first satellite launching vehicle. This project would give the Indian space programme a sense of self-sufficiency. We would no longer have to depend on other countries to launch our rockets and satellites. But once again, we did not have any expertise for it. Dr. Satish Dhawan picks a young engineer to head the project. All eyes are on him but can he pull off this massive feat?

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.

• EV Chitnis
• Gopal Raj
• Roddam Narasimha
• The passage from Gopalraj’s book was read by Sidin Vadukut
• APJ Abdul Kalam’s letter was read by Mr. RC Nathan

References

• What APJ Abdul Kalam said about the launch of SLV-3 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k2jHNNid8

Full Transcript of Episode 10

News Clips announcing India’s successful space mission

With each passing year, India seems to be only getting closer and closer to the rest of the universe. Today, more than ever before, India is capable of going on excursions to the moon or making a quick trip around Mars. Today, more than ever before, space seems within our reach, shrinking our distance with the unknown. 

It’s only an elite club of countries in the world that can boast of being able to do this. A small group of countries who have the ability to not just design and build their own rockets and satellites but also launch them into space themselves.

Now, what if I told you that India’s current space achievements owe it all to one particularly audacious project back in the 1960s? 

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 told you the story of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, a landmark communication experiment that ISRO conducted in collaboration with NASA. The Americans loaned us their communications satellite ATS-6 for a year and ISRO used it to telecast educational programmes in 2400 villages across the country. Through this experiment, ISRO demonstrated that television could indeed play a role in education and in rural development. The experiment also gave both the space programme and the government reasons to invest in communications satellites in the future. 

1975 was a big year for ISRO and a year of big collaborations. First, the Soviets helped us launch our first satellite Aryabhata and four months after that, the Americans helped us conduct one of the biggest communication experiments in the world at that time.

There was now one big task remaining: the design, building and launch of a satellite launching vehicle or SLV – a project that Dr. Sarabhai had planned right from the start. 

The SLV project superseded all the other projects — both in complexity and effort. How did we do it?

Hmm. Where shall I begin this story?

Shall I begin with the mid-1960s when Vikram Sarabhai first voiced the idea of building a satellite launching vehicle? Or shall I begin in 1968 when Sriharikota, the ideal launch site for SLV was found and finalised?

No … you know what, I’m going to begin this story in 1955 when a young boatman’s son from Rameswaram stood at the doorsteps of the Madras Institute of Technology hoping to get in. This young man’s name was in the list of candidates selected for admission at the institute. But he didn’t have the money to pay the fees. The course cost just 1000 rupees but his father simply couldn’t afford it. 

Just when the man was going to walk away from his dream, his sister arrived with the money — she had mortgaged her jewellery for it. The young man had tears in his eyes when she told him that she did this because she believed in his potential.

And she was right. Because of her effort, generations of Indians would recall the name of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the scientist, the missile man and India’s 11th President.

Before he went on to the national stage, APJ Abdul Kalam played a pivotal role in India’s space programme. 

Previously in the podcast, I told you about how Kalam was hired by Vikram Sarabhai. It was HGS Murthy, one of ISRO’s earliest scientists, who recommended to Sarabhai that a young graduate from the Madras Institute of Technology should be given a job at ISRO. EV Chitnis, known as Sarabhai’s second-in-command, said he took one look at Kalam’s resume and said an immediate yes.

Kalam was part of the group of scientists who were sent to NASA for training before India’s first sounding rocket launch. Once he returned to Thumba, he was assigned to work on the design and building of payloads and jettisonable nose cones for rockets.

EV Chitnis
Sarabhai used to call him busy bee. He tried out so many things. And he almost worked 24 hours a day. He was a bachelor. He would eat in canteen and all the time he was working with new ideas. And Sarabhai was very fond of him.

That’s EV Chitnis.

Kalam’s biggest contribution would be in the satellite launch vehicle programme, a project so full of ups and downs that it could be a movie by itself.

In his autobiography, Wings of Fire, Kalam writes that not very long after our first sounding rocket launch, Vikram Sarabhai began talking about building our own satellite launching vehicle. 

Gopal Raj
People who worked with Sarabhai, you know, including Kalam have said that right from the start when, when the sounding rocket programme started, Sarabhai had the idea of having a full fledged Space Programme. 

This is science journalist and author Gopal Raj.

Gopal Raj
But certainly one important indication that comes to — how early Sarabhai and his friend and mentor Homi Bhabha was thinking about the launch vehicle programme, comes in 1965 February, when Homi Bhabha, who was then the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he goes to Washington DC and meets senior NASA officials and and talks about, you know, what would be the cost and time for the development of a small satellite launch vehicle, and whether, you know, technical assistance will be available for such a project. So, clearly at that time itself, they had started thinking about a launch vehicle programme and along with them really possibly also a satellite programme to go with it. 

As usual, this was an audacious idea for the space programme at the time. 

Gopal Raj
In 1965, we didn’t even have an indigenous sounding rocket that was going from Thumba. The first indigenous sounding rocket that was launched from Thumba was a rocket you hold in one hand! Just weighed seven, seven kgs. The RH-75 which had a cordite propellant which is a very perimeter sort of propellant and used for — used in making ammunitions. And that happened only in 1967 November. So even your sounding rocket capabilities was non existent in 1965. 

But both Sarabhai and Bhabha were clear that the capability of launching a Indian-made satellite launching vehicle would make India’s space programme truly self-reliant. Instead of depending on other countries to launch our satellites and rockets, we could launch them ourselves. Self-reliance and indigenous – that’s what they wanted India’s space programme to be. 

Having said that, even thinking of building and launching a launch vehicle of our own in the 1960s was still an audacious idea. Why? 

Very simply put, a launch vehicle is an advanced version of a rocket but it is far more complicated than it sounds. Here’s Gopal Raj again explaining what a launch vehicle is by comparing it with a sounding rocket.

Gopalraj
See, a sounding rocket only needs to go straight. Once the propellants are depleted, it falls back to Earth. Now to put a satellite into orbit, let’s say you want to put a satellite into a 400-kilometre orbit, it’s not enough to just take the satellite to a height of 400 kilometres, the launch vehicle has to inject it at exactly the right angle and exactly the right velocity to go into a particular orbit. So the you know, typically, you’d need a injection velocity of putting a … or something on the order of 27,000 kilometres per hour. So that’s a formidable task to accelerate to that kind of velocity from — you’re starting from zero and you need to reach the orbital velocity and you have to follow a very particular trajectory in order to get there. So you need — tremendous loads that are placed on the on on the launch vehicle as it accelerates through the atmosphere. You need to control the, the vehicle’s, you know, orientation very carefully. If the orientation shift loads have become too high and launch vehicle will break up. It needs to be able to inject..get to a particular spot and inject at the right time with the right velocity. All of these are formidable tasks, and they’re not easy to achieve. 

Basically, a number of complex systems have to work together for a launch vehicle to first escape earth’s gravity, and then be nimble enough to drop a satellite into the designated orbit at the right speed and angle.

Audacious or not, Sarabhai wasted no time in kick-starting this project.

He first commissioned a feasibility study to find out the best way to build satellite launching vehicles. By 1968, this report was ready and it recommended that ISRO should build a four-stage launcher that was modelled on the Scout rocket in America. 

Designed in 1957, the Scout which is an acronym for Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test, was a launcher that was ideal for carrying small satellites and placing them in orbits around the earth. ISRO felt that it could build a launcher similar to Scout with the capacity to carry a 20-40 kg satellite on it. During his visit to NASA, Kalam had also studied this Scout rocket in detail.

Now, let me pause this story here and try to explain to you what a four stage rocket actually is.

Any advanced rocket is generally powered by multiple engines.

Generally, the number of engines decides the number of stages the rocket has. So a four stage rocket has four engines, each equipped with its own fuel tank.

Now, if you’ve seen a rocket launch, you might have noticed that a rocket generally sheds some of its weight mid-air. These parts that are falling off are nothing but the fuel tanks that have exhausted themselves. Here’s how it works.  First, a big fuel tank burns to lift the rocket towards the skies. Then this tank and engine fall off and a second tank starts to burn and propels the rocket further into space. Then, somewhere on the outer edge of the earth, other tanks start to burn and the process repeats. By the time the rocket reaches outer space, it is only a fraction in size from the mammoth rocket that took off. 

Why is this necessary? The first stage is the biggest tank, with loads of fuel to get the rocket to a speed where it can escape Earth’s gravity. As the fuel is exhausted, there is no need to simply carry around the excess weight. And so, the rocket ejects the empty fuel tanks and fires the second tank. This smaller tank can accelerate the rocket quickly with its reduced size. And when this stage has ended, the third stage can be fired and finally, the fourth stage can be used to maneuver the rocket into the exact orbit, angle and speed needed. By this time, a small tank of fuel is enough because the rocket has become much lighter and the earth’s gravitational pull has reduced considerably. 

Alright, let’s return to our story. 

After the first feasibility study, Vikram Sarabhai then commissioned another detailed study to figure out what the exact configurations of the launcher should be. In his book, Reach for the Stars: The evolution of India’s rocket programme, Gopalraj writes that the study group came up with six configurations. Sarabhai chose the third on the list and that’s how the SLV project came to be known as SLV-3. 

Since this was a four-stage launcher, Sarabhai picked four scientists and made each one in charge of one stage. The four men were Vasant Gowariker, AE Muthunayagam, MR Kurup and… Abdul Kalam. All four immediately immersed themselves in solving what would become the biggest challenge of their career back then.

Now while all of this was going on, Sarabhai, simultaneously also decided to send a team to look for an ideal satellite launching station. EV Chitnis, the man who found Thumba, was chosen again for the task and it was decided that this time he would traverse the length and breadth of the east coast of India.

Why the east coast? The logic was simply that a rocket or a launcher taking off eastwards would be able to take advantage of the earth’s rotation and gather more momentum. The Earth rotates eastwards — the sun rises in Japan before the Western nations.  So, launching a rocket in this direction means it can gather more momentum.

As Gopal Raj points out in his book, many launch sites in the world, including Cape Canaveral in the United States, the Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana or Japan’s Kagoshima launch complex are all located on the eastern seaboard.

The story of how ISRO found Sriharikota begins with a trip that EV Chitnis took to Hyderabad for a balloon flight experiment.

It was routine back then for ISRO’s scientists to conduct these experiments by placing payloads inside balloons and sending them up. Vikram Sarabhai told Chitnis that while he was in Hyderabad, he should also try to meet a few officials from the state government there to talk about a suitable site for the satellite launching station.  

Incidentally, the balloon flight experiment was delayed because of the weather that day and so Chitnis went to the Andhra Pradesh secretariat to meet these officials. That meeting went remarkably well. 

It was the Andhra Pradesh Government that showed Chitnis drawings and maps of this spindle-shaped island near Pulicat Lake and asked if it would work. Chitnis felt that it was a textbook site. 

An excited Chitnis brought the drawings and maps back with him to Ahmedabad and showed it to Sarabhai.

EV Chitnis
He said..He was just waiting for me.  And I laid down the map and everything. And I told Vikram Sarabhai — this is your site.  So he said, when are you going there? I said next month. So immediately we went there and and landed in Sriharikota. And it was  almost love at first sight. And 40000 acres of land we got free from government of Andhra Pradesh. Brahmananda Reddy gave that.

Located just around 80 kilometres north of Madras, Sriharikota was just a thin piece of land floating between the Pulicat Lake and the Bay of Bengal. Eucalyptus and Casuarina trees occupied a large portion of the island. The only residents were a few tribals. Flamingos and pelicans and storks made their occasional appearance.

Like Thumba, Sriharikota had no facilities whatsoever when the Andhra Pradesh government handed the site to ISRO. It had no roads and the nearest town was about an hour and half away. Gopalraj writes that the only way to travel around within the island back then was to use the Forest Department’s inspection trolley which was originally meant to carry forest timber and was pushed by labourers.

In May 1969, Sarabhai visited Sriharikota for the first time. Gopalraj writes that the visit was nearly explosive.

Narrator reading from Gopalraj’s book
A temporary track was made up to Sriharikota by laying some bushes, casuarina branches, palmyra leaves and other materials on top to give the jeep tyres some grip. Six jeeps transported Sarabhai and the people who accompanied him to Sriharikota. The friction between the jeep tyres and the sand heated the casuarina leaves to the point that they caught fire. This set fire to the jeep’s tyres and the only way to extinguish the flames was to throw sand over them.

Over the course of three years, this remote island was gradually converted into a rocket and satellite hub. Over 40,000 acres of land, between Buckingham Canal to the West and the Bay of Bengal to the East – was earmarked and a launch pad was built. And by October 1971,the first sounding rocket took off from Sriharikota.

With centres in Ahmedabad, Thumba and now Sriharikota, ISRO’s expansion was now visible even geographically. It was not just limited to the skies.

Two months after the launch site at Sriharikota was inaugurated, Vikram Sarabhai passed away. And the incredible momentum that was built up until this point suffered a slowdown.

The SLV project was the most challenging project that Dr. Satish Dhawan would inherit when he became chairman. 

From our previous episodes you may remember that when Dr. Dhawan took over, one of the first things he noticed was that ISRO was in need of some reorganisation and structuring. This was particularly evident in the SLV project.

Gopal Raj
See, this partly arose because of Sarabhai’s very informal style of management. For instance, when SLV-3 the project, in designing the project, you had…the design of this launch vehicle was divided into 12 separate design projects. Each had a different project director or manager. One person is coordinator. And so this would have been and — so this would have been a recipe for trouble. 

That’s Gopalraj again. Dhawan and Dr. Brahm Prakash who was the new head of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, decided that the SLV project needed ONE project leader overseeing all of it. And the man they chose for the job was Kalam. 

Gopal Raj
Um, I’d say, you see, Kalam’s great ability is that, you know, he gets on well with people at all, you know, at all levels. He’s a very, very good manager of people. He relates to people very well, he is able to get work out of them. I think that was a, that, I suspect that would have been a crucial quality, the ability to get…many of the other peo– as I said, SLV-3, the design phase, there were 12 people having 12, project management, design, design management teams. Meeting those, those remaining 11, I’m not sure would have had that same capability to get people will get people working together without you know, and harmoniously working harmoniously together. And I suspect that’s what Kalam. really had. He’s a good, he’s a good project manager. 

But this decision wasn’t well received at all. The question on the minds of many scientists was why choose Kalam instead of someone more senior!

Roddam Narasimha
I know, I tell you what the problem was. They..I don’t want to mention names.

This is Roddam Narasimha, a veteran aerospace scientist and one of Dhawan’s earliest students.

Roddam Narasimha
Okay. The problem was that as far as the Dhawan was concerned, the people whom he chose for leaders,  were people who were capable of delivering. So you asked me, how did you take on the big task. So he wasn’t looking for the qualifications. He wasn’t looking whether he had a PhD or not, and how many marks they got. He was asking himself, can I trust this man to do this job? You know, that’s how Kalam became the director of a project. Kalam had only a diploma from the Madras Institute of Technology. It was not even called a degree at the time. And he didn’t know much mathematics, he didn’t know much physics. But the quality that Dhawan saw saw in him was that whatever is given to him, whatever was given to him, he did it. 

Kalam had demonstrated this ability to steer projects successfully even before he joined ISRO. During a short stint at the Aeronautical Development Establishment at the Defence Research and Development Organisation in Bangalore, he did this —

Roddam Narasimha
In Bangalore, there was at that time, all of these different establishments, this hover craft they were very popular at the time. These are driven by air being discharged to the ground and from the pressure the thing lifts up. Then the man who pilots it moves it around. Just just one, one foot above the ground or something. So the man who was in charge of the lab wanted such an airlift maker to be made. It had a name, had an English word, it doesn’t come back immediately to me. They asked Kalam whether he would do it. Kalam said yes. And in fact, he got one going. In about a year or two, … was up and going. The story is that MGK Menon had gone there. And the director said, I want to introduce you to man who actually made this happen. And finds out about his background. He was amazed. But somebody with a diploma from MIT does this. But he also said, you know, if you tell him that, if you tell him to do something he will do. So Dhawan knew about that, he had done exactly the same thing in Trivandrum. He had been asked to set up a Carbon Fibre composite plant, which he did. 

But scientists at Thumba and even outside of ISRO were sceptical of the choice. There was a lot of grumbling but luckily, no protests or walk-outs.

Roddam Narasimha
Senior people, there were senior people with PhDs from America, from….they all did not like this at all. But to tell you the truth, the faculty in the Institute of Science did not like it. They thought how can Dhawan do this? How can you put this project in charge of somebody, give somebody this — in fact, you know, they took bets on the campus. 

In his autobiography, Kalam writes that he had his own doubts about leading such a complicated project when there were other senior scientists around. He confided in Brahm Prakash who told him not to compare his strengths with others but to attempt to expand on their abilities.

Once he became the project leader, Kalam got to work immediately. He went about it methodically. First, he looked at the scope of the project and came up with a list of major tasks. Then, he identified the challenges in each task. 

Three sub-groups were made: a programme management group, an integration and flight testing group and a subsystems development group. 

Kalam’s team included scientists and engineers like R Aravamudan who we met briefly in the podcast earlier, Madhavan Nair who would go on to become the chairman of ISRO in the future and MSR Dev who would go on to head the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle programme.

It took our scientists and engineers nearly a decade to build India’s first satellite launch vehicle. 

There were some smart choices that they made that worked in our favour. For instance, they chose to design and build a solid engine rocket instead of a liquid engine rocket. This was because our scientists were better with solid engine rockets and these were simpler to build.

Then, modelling our launcher on the Scout rocket was another smart move. Gopalraj writes that SLV-3 wasn’t a mere copy of the Scout. What Scout provided was only a reference. Our scientists needed to understand the principles at work and apply them to their rocket using materials and components developed by them. 

Close to a million components were used in SLV-3 and nearly 50 major industries and institutions helped in building the vehicle.

As usual, the lack of facilities or infrastructure was hardly a deterrent to this team. The team used mechanical calculators and basic computers capable of elementary computation. My favourite bit however has to do with how we prepared our propellants. They were actually ground on a kitchen grinding stone, and then stuffed into tubes. It was “jugaad” at every stage.

The launch of India’s first satellite launch vehicle was planned for 1978, ten years after Dr. Sarabhai had kickstarted the project. And the team burnt the midnight oil everyday.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, one day, Kalam learnt that his brother-in-law had passed away. He rushed to Rameswaram to be with his family but soon, he felt that he had to come back.

Narrator reading out passage from APJ Abdul Kalam’s book
I felt the whole of my inner self drowning in a sort of anxious agitation, and inner conflicts between my personal and professional life. For many days, back in Thumba, I felt a sense of futility I had never known before — about everything I was doing.”

It was a trying time for Kalam and fate would make things worse for him soon. In 1976, he lost his father and shortly after that, his mother as well. 

A heartbroken and emotionally shattered Kalam felt it was better to immerse himself in work. He was comforted by Dr. Dhawan, who told him that perhaps the success of SLV-3 could provide Kalam with some solace.

It was around this time that Thumba got an interesting visitor. All the way from America, the man who launched the space age, Verner Von Braun had arrived in Trivandrum! Kalam was the one to receive Von Braun in Madras and accompany him to Thumba.

In his book, Kalam writes about a conversation that he had with Von Braun. Kalam asked him what it was like living and working in America? “America is a country of great possibilities”, von braun said, “but they look upon everything un-American with suspicion and contempt. They suffer from a deep-rooted not-invented-here complex and look down on alien technologies”. And finally, Von braun added, “If you want to do anything in rocketry, do it yourself.”

In a way, the original rocket man seemed to have given his blessing and encouragement to Kalam and his team. 

Our own story here seems to have come a full circle since we began this story with Von Braun and his V2 rockets. 🙂

Right. We’re finally inching closer to the moment of truth, the D-Day.

One of Satish Dhawan’s contributions to ISRO was a system of periodic reviews. These reviews would be held not in closed-door meetings but in auditoriums – anyone was free to attend and ask questions. It was in one such meeting in 1978 that it was decided that SLV-3 would need more time to be fully ready to go to space. The new launch date was fixed for 1979 and the vehicle was planning to carry a 40 kg Rohini satellite which would then be placed in an elliptical orbit around 300 kms from earth.

But, months before the final launch, bad news arrived. A group of six engineers were preparing for the flight version of a complex control system in SLV-3. The team was counting down for the launch but one of them noticed that one of the valves wasn’t working. The team went closer to look for the problem and suddenly, the oxidizer tank, filled with nitric acid exploded. The engineers suffered severe acid burns and had to be rushed to the hospital. 

Kalam writes that Sivaramakrishnan Nair, one of the engineers woke up in hospital around 3 am and his first words were that he would make up for the delay in the schedule caused by the accident!

SLV-3 was all that this group of space scientists and engineers could think about!

Finally, on August 10, 1979, it was time for the moment of truth. It was a bright day in Sriharikota and the mood was upbeat and hopeful.

All eyes were on the launch and on Kalam. This was a litmus test for ISRO, yes, but also for Kalam.

Well, what happened?

APJ Abdul Kalam talking about the SLV-3 launch
1979, SLV-3, Satellite Launch Vehicle I was the project director, mission director. My mission is to put the satellite into orbit. Thousands of people worked nearly 10 years. I have reached the..reached the Sriharikota. And it is the launch pad, countdown was going on. T minus 4 minutes, t minus 5 minutes, t minus one minute, t minus 40 seconds, computer put a hold. Don’t launch it.