The Rocket’s Red Glare

After finding an ideal launch site for India’s space programme, it was time to recruit India’s first space scientists and send them to America for training at NASA. Handpicked by Vikram Sarabhai, a small group of scientists finally landed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre and began their training to launch India’s first sounding rocket.

Wide-eyed and enthusiastic, the scientists made the most of their visit and gained a peek into American rocketry. Incidentally, one of the scientists even found something that reminded him of India’s history with rockets.

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.

• Pramod Kale
• EV Chitnis

References

• Star Spangled Banner – performed by the Ruppe Sisters – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA6UG9FkcjA

---

Full Transcript of Episode 3 – The Rocket’s Red Glare

“And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there”. If you’ve heard The Star Spangled Banner, the American National anthem, you’ve heard the words, “the rocket’s red glare”. 

There is an interesting story behind how these words came to be a part of that anthem.  And I’m telling you that story for a reason. Stay with me for a bit as I tease this out for you.

On September 11, 1814, British warships continuously bombarded Fort McHenry, in Baltimore, in the United States. This was a part of the War of 1812, also known as the Second War of Independence in America, fought between the United States and Britain. 

At this point in time, it had barely been 35 years since America had achieved its independence from the British and the relationship between these two countries was rough. In Europe, Britain was engaged in a long war with Napoleon of France, and France was a major trading partner of the US. 

Britain sought to cut off these trade ties through naval routes. 

A series of escalating incidents eventually led to the US declaring war on Britain in June 1812.  

The war lasted for 3 years.

But let’s cut to September 11, 1814. 

6 a.m. 

British troops bombarded Fort McHenry for 25 hours straight. This included guns and bombs blazing but also rockets with a range of 3 kilometres raining down on the American fort.

The Americans managed to withstand the relentless bombardment, and when the bombs and rockets fell silent, they hoisted an enormous American flag on top of the fort the next morning.

A lawyer from Washington, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the intensity of this entire battle from a ship off the coast of Baltimore. It left a deep imprint on his mind. But, when he saw the American flag come up on the fort the next morning, he was so moved that he composed a poem he called “The Defence of Fort McHenry”. 

The poem recreated in words the entire scene of battle including the British rocket’s red glare. It embodied American patriotism. 

That poem later came to be known as the Star Spangled Banner and eventually, a century later, become the American National Anthem. 

Okay, I hope you’re still with me. 

Now, nearly 150 years after rockets struck Fort McHenry, a 31-year-old Indian, the son of a poor boatman from southern Tamil Nadu, finds an intriguing painting that captures his attention. 

It is 1962 and this young man is at a NASA research laboratory, just 60km from Fort McHenry.

The subject of the painting is a battle scene and there are rockets here as well. The only difference is that this time the rockets were blowing up the red coats, horses and men of the British army. 

Who was shooting those rockets? Not Americans, but Indians — much like his friends and family back home. 

This was the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan’s army fighting the British in the Anglo-Mysore war of 1780. 

The Indian staring at the painting … was APJ Abdul Kalam.

Okay, 

The star-spangled banner, Tipu Sultan, rockets, NASA and Kalam. 

What do all of these have to do with each other? It’s a good quiz question … no?

More importantly, what do they have to do with the story of India’s space programme? 

I’ll tell you the answer in a bit. For now, I’ll just say that history has a way of travelling in circles.

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 talked about how the launch of the world’s first satellite, the Sputnik by the Soviet Union, added thrust to the burgeoning space race between the Americans and the Russians. 

Sputnik’s launch was also a global sensation which inspired countries across the world to start their own space programmes and India was no exception to this — Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha felt that the timing was perfect. India should formally start a space programme. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru supported their idea as well.

The perfect opportunity for a start came when NASA, still reeling from the shock of being upstarted by the Russians, decided to open its doors for collaboration. The US feared that Sputnik would lead to an increase in the communist nation’s influence on the world and attempted to counter it by offering partnerships with countries that were starting off their space programme. 

Among the first to knock on NASA’s doors was Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha. They wanted America to help set up in India, a sounding rocket station and also a tracking station to communicate with satellites. I’ll tell you what both those things are very soon, but let’s continue for now. 

Sarabhai felt that India’s proximity to the magnetic equator could prove to be an advantage. It could help bridge the gap in the study of cosmic rays and a number of other intriguing phenomena in the upper atmosphere. 

NASA agreed to the proposal. India’s Space programme was gathering steam.

All that remained was to find a suitable launch site in India, somewhere close to the magnetic equator. Vikram Sarabhai and his team decided on Thumba, a small fishing hamlet near Thiruvananthapuram or Trivandrum in Kerala. The challenge, however, was convincing the fishermen in that village to give up their land for the space programme. 

Interestingly, the Bishop of the church in Thumba finally made it happen. The sleepy sea-side village populated with coconut trees was to become India’s first space centre.

And here we go.

It was lunch time at the Department of Atomic energy in Trombay and Ramabhadran Aravamudan, a 24 year old junior engineer at the Reactor Control division, was chatting with his friend in the canteen.

Having moved from Madras to Bombay, Aravamudan had been working at the Department of Atomic Energy for two years and was itching to do something different. “I was getting fed up of the crowds and the hustle and bustle,” he writes in his memoir ‘ISRO: A Personal Story’.

Just then, his friend tells him about a potential job opportunity. 

Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of the Physical Research Laboratory or PRL in Ahmedabad, was looking for volunteers to set up a rocket launch pad in Kerala. He was specifically looking for a group of engineers who could be sent to NASA for training before they started working in Kerala.

“Should we volunteer?”, His friend asked Aravamudan. “It all sounds vague but NASA sounds exciting”, he added.

Aravamudan writes about his state of mind at the time and I quote: “Even while he was wondering about it, I had made up my mind. This seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity. First NASA and then back home to south India. What more could I ask for? There was no question. I would try my luck — I was volunteering!”

Over the next few weeks, Aravamudan researched as much as he could about Sarabhai and the project he was recruiting for. And soon, accompanied by another friend, he was on an overnight train to Ahmedabad to meet Sarabhai. If the interview went well, he would have to leave for the US in a month.

It was EV Chitnis who welcomed them at PRL. Vikram Sarabhai was on his way, Aravamudan was told. 

An hour later, a standard herald car with an open top made its way into PRL. Dressed in white shorts and a shirt, Vikram Sarabhai stepped out. He asked Aravamudan and his friend to hop into the car and drove them to a telemetry receiving trailer from NASA that was parked in the PRL campus.

In his memoir, Aravamudan describes Sarabhai’s charm as “mesmeric”. During that meeting, Sarabhai told Aravamudan about his plans for the space programme – the NASA project and what was being planned in Thumba later. 

“It all sounded like science fiction to me,” Aravamudan writes. “By now I was bowled over by the charisma of Dr. Sarabhai, the gleam in his eyes when he described his plans and his sincerity. I wanted very much to be one of the chosen few.”

And he was. 

Aravamudan was selected along with three others — all from PRL: B Ramakrishna Rao, A.S Prakasa Rao and Pramod Kale – who we met very briefly in our previous episode.

Now, when NASA agreed to collaborate with INCOSPAR or, the Indian National Committee for Space Research, which was set-up to kickstart the space programme, it was interested in using sounding rockets to conduct two kinds of experiments at the magnetic equator. 

But before we get to those experiments, let’s talk about sounding rockets.

How does a sounding rocket work?

A sounding rocket is a research rocket. These are rockets that would go up to a particular height and take measurements or collect data and relay them back to the earth.

Now, for a rocket to be able to take off, one of the main things that it needs is a propellant – the fuel that propels it towards the skies.

Rockets also carry something called a payload.

Pramod Kale
Let us say that you have a taxi. Okay? The driver is there. He is part of the vehicle and the vehicle transportation system. But the passenger is the payload. That’s the whole idea that something which has to be carried in any kind of a vehicle. For an aircraft, the passengers are the payload, for a cargo aircraft, the cargo itself is the payload and so, for the whole of the aircraft which is there, out of that only certain portion will be the payload. In the same way, it is for our sounding rockets also.

That’s Pramod Kale with some rocket 101.

The payload in the sounding rockets can comprise scientific instruments like temperature sensors, pressure sensors and so on — and these instruments conduct measurements or collect data as the rocket soars up in the skies. That information is then relayed via radio signals called telemetry. And those telemetry signals are then studied by scientists.

So, anyway, as per India’s agreement with NASA, we had to conduct two experiments. The first experiment aimed to investigate the properties of the upper atmosphere near the earth’s magnetic equator using four sodium vapour payloads.

Sodium vapour has the ability to produce a trail of light that can penetrate mist and fog particularly well. So, the logic was that it could help illuminate parts of the upper atmosphere near the magnetic equator when sent from a sounding rocket. Those trails would then be photographed from the ground, making it easier for scientists to conduct their investigations — especially about wind speeds in the upper atmosphere.

The second experiment that NASA proposed was to study a stream of electric current called the ‘equatorial electrojet’ and the interesting behaviour it exhibits at the Magnetic dip equator.

We talked about the magnetic dip equator in our previous episode — the line across the earth is where the earth’s magnetic field is exactly horizontal. And this magnetic dip equator passes through the southern tip of India.

Let me attempt a simplified explanation here. If you rubbed a woolen sweater against your arm for a bit, you will find the hair on your arm standing up. This is because of static electricity and it happens because when you rub the sweater on your arm, electrons move from one surface to the other. This causes one side, say your arm, to be positively charged, and the sweater’s side to be negative. Opposites attract, and so, the hair on your arm will rise towards the sweater until electrons are exchanged again and both surfaces lose their charge.

The sun’s rays behave similarly and do the same to the earth’s atmosphere. The constant bombardment causes electrically charged atoms in the earth’s ionosphere. 

Anyway, during the day, a whole bunch of these charged atoms in the ionosphere start to move eastwards, driven by solar winds, along the magnetic equator. And it is this stream of ionised particles that is called an equatorial electrojet.

This phenomenon was first discovered only in the 1920s, and there was little that was understood about it. Scientists felt it was important to find out how it impacts the earth’s atmosphere and the earth’s magnetic field. 

As Pramod Kale explains —

Pramod Kale
There are currents flowing in the upper atmosphere, in the ionosphere, at a height of 100-220 kilometres and these are the currents which are generated, which are what should I say, modified by the presence of the solar activity daily. And that is the one that is the one that is changing our magnetic field daily – going slightly high, going slightly low, those kind of things are happening. And from the magnetic field, if you wanted to take the measurements, we would have to carry a magnetometer on the rocket.

Right, so for us to be able to pull this entire project off, NASA had said it would provide the rockets, the training for scientists, and additional personnel – and India, on the other hand, would have to provide the launch site and the scientists.

The launch site, Thumba, a fishing hamlet had been found and while it was being converted into a rocket launching site, Sarabhai had assembled his team of scientists. 

Interestingly, NASA kept insisting on a particular eligibility criterion that Indian scientists had to meet in order to qualify for training at NASA.

Pramod Kale
When this whole idea of training came up, NASA was saying that India should send people with PhD degree only. Finally Dr. Sarabhai had to ask — what is this about PhD degree. 

The scientists that Sarabhai chose for the space programme were all in their twenties and thirties with a Masters degree at best. At that point in time, scientists with PhDs in space science were a rarity. But that was not what NASA was after.

Pramod Kale
They said that if they come with the PhD degree, it means that they will be able to speak English properly. Hahahaha. And Dr. Sarabhai said leave that thing to us, they will be able to speak English and we’ll send you the kind of a team that is required. Haha.

Pramod Kale, Ramabhadran Aravamudan, Ramakrishna Rao and Prakasa Rao – the four scientists, met for the first time in Washington DC.

Pramod Kale
It was good to meet all these people. One of the things which we found out that we could talk with each other only in English hahaha.

For all of them, this was their first trip to America. And they were asked to report at the sounding rocket branch of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre at Beltsville, Maryland, which was a short drive from Washington DC.

Pramod Kale
We had landed in the first week of January 1963 and it was extremely cold, I said it seems to be just about maybe 0 degrees or so. Then I realised it was 0 degrees fahrenheit and not 0 degrees centigrade. Hahaha.

Aravamudan too — who would soon be called ‘Dan’ by the Americans — was used to the heat and humidity of Madras and Bombay, those temperatures came as quite a shock. In his book he writes that his preparation included getting himself two woollen suits made to order from a reputed tailor in Bombay. 

The place that these men would spend all their time in for the next six months was one of NASA’s earliest centres: the Goddard Space Flight Centre. 

Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard, a physicist after whom this centre is named, is today known as the father of modern rocket propulsion. In his lifetime however, he was largely under appreciated for his contribution to both missile and space technology. As early as 1926, Goddard had constructed and successfully tested the first rocket using liquid fuel. NASA compares Goddard’s first rocket flight to the Wright Brothers flying the world’s first airplane at Kitty Hawk. 

Goddard didn’t get credit or support for his work during his lifetime. Even though his work foresaw the technical detail that the German V2 rockets would later embody. So, when NASA set up the flight centre in May 1959, it made amends by naming it after Goddard.

During their training tenure, each of the four Indian scientists specialised in specific technologies: Kale and Prakasa Rao learnt how to track a rocket using a system called Dovamp – Doppler Radiant Velocity.  Regular radars couldn’t track rockets beyond a distance of 50 kilometres and since these sounding rockets would go up to a distance of 150 to 200 kilometres – a different system was needed and that was the Dovamp.

Dan and Ramakrishna learnt how to receive data from the rockets and also to build a telemetry ground station mounted inside a trailer, which would be on a long-term loan to Thumba.

So, who was trained in the assembly and operation of the sounding rocket then?

Three more Indian scientists arrived at Washington for this by March 1963: HGS Murthy, a former aeronautics engineer from the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited; D Easwardas from the Department of Atomic Energy. 

The third? A shy, young graduate from the Madras Institute of Technology and the son of a boatman from southern Tamil Nadu. You may have guessed who this is already. 

APJ Abdul Kalam has entered our story.

Kalam had by then also worked in the Aeronautical Development Establishment in Bangalore where he built a trial hovercraft. 

It was HGS Murthy, the HAL engineer who recommended Kalam’s name to Sarabhai. Sarabhai took Kalam’s CV and handed it to Chitnis and said “You tell me what to do”.

EV Chitnis
So, I studied his biodata and I said let us take him. 

This is EV Chitnis.

EV Chitnis
You know, he actually… came from a very poor family. He was boatman’s son. His father was plying boats from Rameswaram. He was a very bright student and he studied at Madras institute of technology. He did not have the money — father being a boatman but then his sister sold her marriage ornaments and gave money for his education. So, that is the kind of culture and dedication and devotion and determination of a person and his family. So, naturally you have to ignore….nothing else is important. This man is bound to succeed. So, it was very easy selection.

Kalam, Murthy and Easwardas were soon sent to NASA’s sounding rocket launch station on Wallops Island. This was like a three-hour drive from Goddard Space Flight Centre. The Wallops Island launch station was set up even before the Goddard Flight Centre — in 1945. It is one of the most prolific launch sites in the world. 

One estimate says 14,000 rockets have taken off from here, another pegs that number at 16,000. In fact, the Wallops Station is synonymous with the birth of the American space programme. It seemed fitting, then I guess, that India was making its first space overtures at such a significant site.

At Wallops Station, Murthy, Kalam and Easwardas were trained in rocket assembly, launching and explosive safety. The Indians weren’t the only space scientists there in NASA for training. Aravamudan writes about meeting Pakistani space scientists, for instance. The Pakistani contingent was larger than India’s. Aravamudan writes, “We were rather wary of each other and carefully avoided talking politics.” 

In an article for Time Magazine that he wrote about Kalam, Dan relayed some more memories from their trip to America in 1962 and 63. He writes: “Our lodgings were called the B.O.Q., or the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, and we’d lunch together at the cafeteria where, because we were both vegetarians, we survived mainly on mashed potatoes, boiled beans, peas, bread and milk. Weekends in Wallops Island were lonely affairs, as the nearest town of Pocomoke City was an hour’s drive away. Thankfully for us, NASA put on a free flight to Washington D.C. for its recruits, so we would head up to the American capital on Friday nights and return to Wallops on the Monday morning shuttle.”

In the same article, Dan also writes about a training session at NASA involving Kalam and rockets. “I remember one training session where Kalam had to fire a dummy rocket when the countdown hit zero. It was only after half a dozen attempts when he kept firing the rocket either a few seconds too early or too late that the man who went on to become one of India’s best known rocket scientists managed to get it right.”

According to space historian Asif Siddiqi, all things considered, the training at NASA was quite successful. In his research paper, Siddiqi cites a confidential NASA memo which says and I quote “these individuals were judged by their NASA counterparts as technically very well qualified.’ 

All was indeed well, overall.

Okay, all this talk of Kalam reminds me – I almost forgot to tell you the story I promised I would, right at the start of this episode. This is the story that connects the rocket’s red glare from the American National anthem with that of Tipu Sultan’s army in Mysore and also features Kalam somehow. 

Sometime during his visit to NASA, Kalam walked into the reception lobby at the Wallops Island rocket launching station. There, he happened to see a painting that caught his eye. And he writes about it rather evocatively in his autobiography.

“It depicted a battle scene with a few rockets flying in the background. A painting with this theme should be the most commonplace thing at a Flight Facility, but the painting caught my eye because the soldiers on the side launching the rockets were not white, but dark-skinned, with the racial features of people found in South Asia. One day, my curiosity got the better of me, drawing me towards the painting. It turned out to be Tipu Sultan’s army fighting the British. The painting depicted a fact forgotten in Tipu’s own country but commemorated here on the other side of the planet. I was happy to see an Indian glorified by NASA as a hero of warfare rocketry.”

What does Tipu Sultan’s army have to do with rocketry? 

Here’s that story: Rockets, especially in their military avatar, have had a long history. The Chinese are believed to have used them in the 13th century; the Europeans in the 14th and 15th century. But when the cannon, with its higher calibre and fire power came along, armies across the world chose cannons, and made rockets rather obsolete.

In the late 18th century, Hyder Ali and Tipu, the terrific father-son duo and the erstwhile rulers of the Mysore kingdom brought the military rocket back in vogue during their rule. They also improvised on its design a little to make it more powerful. 

The Chinese and the Europeans had created rockets using bamboo tubes. But these bamboo-tube rockets didn’t have the range and stability that was required for rockets to travel long distances. What Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan did was replace bamboo tubes with iron tubes. The logic was that this would bring about higher bursting pressures in the combustion chamber and hence higher thrust and longer range for the missile. 

Their design actually worked — their rockets travelled up to 2 kilometres.

And so, the British, when they challenged the Mysore kingdom, did not anticipate rockets of all things to strike them. Aerospace scientist Roddam Narasimha writes that one of the main reasons why Mysore won the famous battle of Pollilur in 1780 against the British was because Tipu’s rockets struck the British’s ammunition tumbrils, blowing them up instantaneously. Rockets were used in the third and the fourth Anglo-Mysore wars as well causing great commotion and terror for British troops. 

Okay, we’ve covered the Kalam connection and the history of Tipu Sultan’s rockets but what does all of this have to do with the Americans and the line “the rocket’s red glare” in their national anthem? 

Hold on, I’m getting there.

Despite his clever use of rockets, Tipu Sultan and his Mysore army couldn’t hold out for too long. Mysore was eventually defeated by the British. 

After defeating Tipu, what the British did was actually spend some time studying his rockets to develop their own versions. That’s how much of an impression Tipu’s rockets had made on the British. After a deep and systematic analysis of the propellants and the performance of the rockets, eventually, Sir William Congreve, an English artillery officer, developed a series of rockets called the Congreve rockets. 

The British used these newly developed rockets in a number of their military escapades thereafter. And one such use was against the Americans in 1814. The rockets that Frances Key saw in the air and which inspired the line “And the rockets red glare” actually was a rocket that was in turn inspired by an Indian’s wizardry in rocketry.

As a quiz master and a fan of interesting factoids, to me, it is quite fascinating that a painting showing off Tipu’s rockets against the British is on display at the reception lobby of the Wallops Island facility. To me, it shows that history does indeed go around in circles. 

And oh while we’re on the topic of history going in circles, back in his day, Tipu’s rockets were assembled in a place called Taramandalpet (taara-mandal-pet). This name loosely translates to an area where lights in the night sky are caused by rockets. This area is today located in Kalasipalya (KaLasi-paLya) near the congested heart of modern day Bangalore. 

Isn’t it intriguing that in 1780, Bangalore was the centre of Indian rocketry, and by the mid-20^th century, it would again become the centre for India’s space science programme?

Anyway, back to our story — months after Kalam stood admiring the painting of Tipu’s rockets, America would provide India with a few rockets to facilitate the start of India’s space programme. A rocket would take off from Indian soil after nearly two centuries. This rocket launch was going to attempt a different kind of conquest of course — a conquest of the skies. But this time too, the rocket would leave a red glare in the skies.

Things seemed to be going smoothly – scientists were trained, the American rockets would arrive in India soon, and a date had been picked for the launch as well.

But what if I told you that back home, in the weeks before the launch of India’s first rocket, a lot of things would go wrong.

Our scientists would not just be worried about solving problems related to space science or rocket engineering. They would also be forced to break their heads about trucks breaking down, trains losing their way, the skies threatening to open AND…

Well I’ll tell you in the next episode.