A youthful Madhavan Nair absorbed in work

The fourth decade (1993-2003), which I would call the Kasturirangan decade, saw rich returns from the investments made in the earlier decades. Resounding successes in the PSLV and GSLV programmes and the consolidation of the indigenous capability in the launch vehicle and space systems area bore ample testimony to the attainment of quality and reliability with adequate safety. India became self reliant in Space services and even started providing launch services for the international community.

We are now at the threshold of the fifth decade. Can I call it the Madhavan Nair decade? The Indian Space programme today has become a byword for excellence and is a leading example of how a nation can develop self-reliance in a strategic technological area, starting from scratch and overcoming various obstacles in spite of embargoes and technology denial regimes.

The saga of Indian Space Research has been an exciting one. I was privileged to have been a participant right from its inception. In fact, I was there even before it all began. I am therefore thrilled to share with you some of the excitement of those initial days when we were still a small, close-knit family group.

Those were the days when the core team consisted of a mere handful of young men. We operated with total informality on a budget of a few lakhs. ISRO has, today, turned into a giant with staff strength exceeding 16,000 full time employees and budgets running into thousands of crores per year. Obviously, the informality of those days cannot exist in today's environment. ISRO has necessarily turned into a well structured entity.

Readying a Sounding Rocket for launch

My induction into the space programme was in late 1962, even before Thumba was formally chosen for locating a rocket station. I was a young electronics engineer working in the Reactor control division of the Department of Atomic Energy at Trombay, when word got around that Sarabhai was looking for fresh electronic engineers to form a core team to set up a small Rocket Launch Pad in South Kerala. This demand came from a group of international geophysicists who wanted to conduct in situ vertical soundings from the Geomagnetic Equator.

I was interested in the opportunity since I wanted to get away from the crowd and noise of Bombay and green and peaceful Kerala offered a perfect alternative. I was asked to travel to Ahmedabad and meet Dr Sarabhai to get to know the details at first hand.

I took the Bombay-Ahmedabad train and checked into a seedy hotel. I took an autorickshaw to Navrangapura where the Physical Research Laboratory was situated. The first person whom I met was Professor E V Chitnis, a handsome young man who said that Dr Sarabhai would meet me shortly.

As I was hanging around in the corridor waiting, a Standard Herald car with an open top stopped at the portico and a fair and dashing looking young man dressed in white shorts and shirt stepped out and asked, "Are you Aravamudan?" I said yes and he immediately asked me to hop into the car. He drove up a short distance to an Instrumentation trailer from NASA parked in the campus. Later, I learnt that this was called the Microlock Receiving Trailer. He led me inside and personally explained to me the workings of this trailer and how it received signals from scientific satellites. He then went on to explain how he was planning to do scientific experiments from Kerala, perhaps from near Trivandrum, using rockets carrying measuring instruments. He also described the launch pad, telemetry receiving station, radar and Doppler velocity and position system he hoped to install.

It all sounded like science fiction to me, but I was quite interested mainly because if I took the assignment, it meant my moving down South. Also it involved a spell of training in NASA which sounded quite exciting. But, more than anything else, it was the Charisma of Sarabhai …the gleam in his eyes when he described his plans … and his sincerity which attracted me.