ISRO

Chandrayaan-3, the mission that aims to achieve the feat of conducting a “soft” landing on the Moon’s southern pole, launched off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Andhra Pradesh on Friday (July 14) afternoon.

It will now take approximately 42 days to reach the Moon. Should it conduct a successful landing, India will become only the fourth country – after the United States, Russia, and China – to have done so.

Since its inception in 1969, the country’s space agency Isro has carried out altogether 89 launch missions carrying satellites into space

Vikaram Sarabhai

Source: Britannica

2. Early beginnings

• The history of space activities in India reflects how little by little, institutions centred around space exploration and research were set up and expanded
• Along with Vikram Sarabhai, a few scientists worked here but lacked adequate funds
• However, Sarabhai was able to secure some resources from both the USSR and the US, even during the period of the Cold War rivalry
•  His efforts paid off, and on November 21, 1963, a small American sounding rocket, known as Nike Apache, took off from Thumba, a fishing hamlet near Trivandrum, Kerala
• This place was chosen for meeting certain geography and physics-related criteria, such as of being at the magnetic equator, which eased the process of the rocket’s launch.
• Sounding rockets are one or two-stage solid propellant rockets used for probing the upper atmospheric regions and for space research
• They also serve as easily affordable platforms to test or prove prototypes of new components intended for use in launch vehicles and satellites
• With the establishment of the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in 1963 at Thumba, a location close to the magnetic equator, there was a quantum jump in the scope for aeronomy and atmospheric sciences in India
• While looking for a decent building to work the only “decent building” available was one St Magdalene Church
• One of Sarabhai’s early recruits, D Easwaradas, is quoted as saying “The church was our workshop and the bishop’s house was our office.”
• The building was later converted into the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Space Museum in 1985
• The building assumed multifaceted roles in the beginning of ISRO by acting as the first lab and as the main office for scientists in the early days

 3. Journey of INSCOPAR and ISRO

• In 1962, Nehru and Sarabhai established the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) as an autonomous body that was a part of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), then headed by the pioneering Indian scientist Homi J Bhabha
• The ICONOSPAR grew to become the Indian Space Research Organisation in 1969
• With the establishment of the ISRO and further with the government of India forming a dedicated Department of Space (DOS) in 1972, research and execution of space-related enterprises got a boost. ISRO was also brought under the DOS
• ISRO now has its headquarters in Bengaluru. Its activities are spread across various centres and units
• Launch Vehicles are built at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram; satellites are designed and developed at U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bengaluru; integration and launching of satellites and launch vehicles are carried out from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), and so on