India's rocket dreams were born in Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: As the nation sat glued to their TV sets watching Isro's workhorse, PSLV-C37, launch 104 satellites into space — a new world record — the vapour trail of this dream leads back to the year 1962. It was then that the rocket dreams were first conjured up in meetings of the National Committee for Space Research (NCSR) at Ahmedabad PRL, under the leadership of Vikram Sarabhai.

Back then, it was a proposal to fly American made Nike-Apache sounding rockets for upper atmospheric studies. On Wednesday, of the 104 satellites the PSLV carried and successfully put into orbit, 96 were American satellites.

At those NCSR meetings were three Ahmedabad-based scientists, Dr Praful Bhavsar, Dr Satya Prakash and Prof UD Desai. Sarabhai had sought help from the United Nations and NASA to help set up the Thumba rocket launching station at Trivandrum. By 1963, Prof Bhavsar and Dr GS Moorthy were in-charge of launching the country's first rocket, the 725kg Nike-Apache sounding rocket on November 21, 1963. The rocket had travelled at 3,800km per hour.

"Vikram wanted to free the nation from the clutches of poverty by using technology and development of science, dissemination of information, nuclear power for self-reliance and a management institute for a competitive business environment and he set up institutions for that," Dr Bhavsar told TOI in an earlier interview.

Dr Bhavsar was handpicked by Dr Sarabhai in 1948 for PRL, to study cosmic rays. Dr Bhavsar claims that by 1950, most discussions at PRL centred around rockets and satellites. So it was on November 20, 1967, that India first launched its indigenously made Rohini RH-75 sounding rocket from Thumba.

Along with this launch was a Judy-dart rocket with an indigenous payload. Dr Bhavsar said the first Rohini sounding rocket did not carry a payload and was just to see whether India had the capability to launch its own rockets. "We came out triumphant in the very first attenmpt," said Dr Bhavsar.