Finding the time and the money for space

On November 21, 1963, a small foreign rocket took off from Thumba, an obscure fishing hamlet near Trivandrum. This marked the birth of the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station and of the Indian space programme. For Bhabha and Sarabhai, TERLS was the first step in acquiring rocket technology: first sounding rockets and then bigger and more complex rockets, known as launch vehicles, capable of orbiting satellites. He got U.N. sponsorship for TERLS; created the Space Science and Technology Centre close to TERLS; established the Experimental Satellite Communications Earth Station in Ahmedabad; saw the first indigenous sounding rocket take off from Thumba; created the Indian Space Research Organisation ; sowed the seeds of remote sensing and satellite communications; completed formalities for an agreement with the Soviet Union to launch India’s first satellite ; signed an agreement with NASA for joint conduct of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment; obtained a licence to produce the French sounding rocket, Centaure, in India; got Sriharikota island on the east coast for establishing a rocket launching range; flagged off the development of India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV-3; drew the road map that ISRO followed for the next four decades and then died in his sleep on December 30, 1971. “On the one side there were many experienced senior people in the organisation and on other side, I had to tap talents of thousands of engineers both from ISRO and academic institutions.” In November 1963, when the first sounding rocket was launched from TERLS, virtually everything came from abroad.