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Vikram Sarabhai's vision and SLV-3

Twenty-five years ago, on July 18, 1980, with the successful flight of Space Launch Vehicle-3, India became one of the few countries capable of launching satellites. The venture was not intended as a way of breaking into an exclusive club. Rather, it was a necessary and important step towards realising the dream of Vikram Sarabhai, the visionary who established the Indian space programme and imbued it with a great constructive mission. "We must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the problem of man and society which we find in our country," he declared. Satellites would provide cost-effective communications and broadcasting in a vast country like India with poorly developed infrastructure; earth imagery would permit efficient management of its natural resources; and space-based cameras could keep constant watch on the weather. Technology must not be imported as a black box, and India must both build its own satellites and put them in orbit on its rockets, insisted Dr. Sarabhai. It took ten years to develop SLV-3, a launcher with modest capabilities modelled on the Scout rocket of the United States. This was the breakthrough event. After another experimental rocket, the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV), the Indian Space Research Organisation built the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). This now launches operational earth imaging satellites and will propel the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft on the first leg of its journey to the Moon. The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) is successfully launching communication satellites and a more powerful version of it, the GSLV Mark III, is under development.

It has been an extraordinary journey that began in the early 1960s from a church building and a few sheds in the fishing village of Thumba on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram. The first step was learning to launch foreign-made sounding rockets that would fly straight up, carrying scientific instruments for atmospheric studies. Next, the young men Dr. Sarabhai had gathered around him began making sounding rockets within the country. What is remarkable is that this great scientific visionary and man of peace began seriously contemplating the development of powerful launch vehicles even before modern sounding rockets were being built indigenously. A relatively simple launch vehicle like SLV-3 represents a huge leap in complexity, technological capability, and management structures compared with those needed for sounding rockets. Dr. Sarabhai reposed tremendous faith in the capability of his people and events have shown him to be brilliantly correct. There is an important lesson in this for India as it seeks to make a significant technological impact on the world in the years to come — as the Chinese are determinedly planning to do. The success of SLV-3 and India's space programme demonstrates that when scientific projects are well focussed and shaped by a clear long-term vision, when such projects fire the imagination of young people and harness their energy, the sky need not be the limit.

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