As New Scientist went to press, India’s first moon mission was approaching lunar orbit. For Madhavan Nair, the mission head, it is the culmination of nearly 40 years’ work. But why are space missions a priority for India? Anil Ananthaswamy found out
TWO weeks ago, India’s first moon mission blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, near Chennai. It was a perfect early morning launch but in the control room Madhavan Nair sat silently until the spacecraft had safely reached its intended Earth orbit. Only then did he get up and hug his colleagues.
Nair has watched India’s space programme from the inside for nearly 40 years, from entry-level engineer to chairman of the 16,000-strong – but he has never directly witnessed a launch. “I have been associated with almost all the launches of ISRO, and it is a sad story but I have not seen a launch with my naked eyes. I have had to be within the control centre in some capacity or other,” Nair told me two weeks before the launch, managing to squeeze an appointment into one of his busy 12 to 14-hour days at the agency’s Bangalore headquarters. He was not the only one working so hard, thanks to a sudden change of plan about two months earlier.
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The original idea was for ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 (Hindi for moon craft) to enter a tight lunar orbit on its first attempt. The problem was, no Indian satellite had travelled further than 36,000 kilometres from Earth, let alone 400,000 kilometres to the moon. Nair felt uneasy. “I thought there could be some risk associated with that, because we have so many unknowns – the influence of the sun, the lunar gravity field, and even perturbations in the trajectory itself.” So he agreed to alter the plan and give the probe an easier, bigger orbit to start with before it moved closer in. The engineers burned the candle at both ends, says Nair, frantically redoing hundreds of computer simulations.
The decision is typical of Nair, both cautious and brave, attentive to detail, yet ready to risk eleventh hour changes if necessary – traits he has honed during his long apprenticeship.
In the early 1970s, India’s fledgling space programme was developing its first satellite launch vehicle (SLV). Project director Abdul Kalam, who went on to become president of India, was looking for someone to design the electronics to blow up rockets that went astray. Nair was a young, relatively unknown researcher, and though “deeply impressed” by his dedication and abilities, Kalam “did not rate his chances”, given the competition. However, a meeting with Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space programme, changed the young man’s fortunes.
Impressed by Nair’s daring design, Sarabhai chose him over a more experienced colleague, and Nair went on to successfully destroy a test rocket from the ground. Fortunately, ISRO has never had to make use of his system. “Touch wood,” says Nair.
Nair might never have joined the space agency but for Ramabhadran Aravamudan – a scientist hired by Sarabhai to kick-start the country’s space programme. Aravamudan came to Bombay in the late 1960s to scout for talent. Having completed his training with the Department of Atomic Energy, Nair was considering the nuclear option. He was “very soft-spoken, but very sharp and intelligent”, says Aravamudan, and though the space programme was meagre, confined to launching rockets for atmospheric studies, Aravamudan persuaded Nair to join ISRO’s launch centre near Trivandrum in Kerala.
One of the reasons for Nair’s decision was Sarabhai’s vision for the newly independent India: “There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose… we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.”
That ideal was still a long way off, though. The early days of rocketry at the agency were amateurish. Nair recalls the launch in 1969 of a small rocket carrying a canister that was supposed to ignite at 100 kilometres. Nothing happened, and it was only then that it occurred to the disappointed scientists that an ignition needs oxygen and there was none at that altitude. “We learned from our mistakes, and we learned the hard way,” says Nair.
“We learned from our mistakes and we learned the hard way”
From these small beginnings, came the 17-tonne SLV rocket, which in 1980 helped India become the sixth nation to launch its own satellite. Nair went on to become the project director for the more powerful polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV). With 13 successful launches since 1994, the PSLV is ISRO’s workhorse – a 300-tonne rocket capable of boosting a 1.5-tonne payload into orbit. Its reliability made it the rocket of choice to take India to the moon.
By 2003, Nair found himself at ISRO’s helm, just as the Chandrayaan mission was taking shape. Despite his status, the agency boss doesn’t hide behind his desk – a common trait in a famously bureaucratic country. He allows just 2 hours a day for paperwork and devotes the rest to technical work. He is a quiet man, though, and somewhat impenetrable, preferring not to talk about himself.
Behind the soft-spoken exterior lies an energetic, incisive decision-maker, says Devarajan Narayanamoorthi, former director of ISRO’s launch vehicle programme. He remembers sitting alongside Nair in the control room during the first launch of the PSLV on 20 September 1993. Within 12 minutes, the rocket crashed into the Bay of Bengal. Nair was momentarily shaken, but in no time was telling his team, “We nearly succeeded, we should quickly find out the reasons.” The investigation started that very evening, says Narayanamoorthi.
Within a year, the PSLV had flown successfully, launching a 1-tonne remote-sensing satellite and bringing India’s space programme closer to its founder’s dream of self-sufficiency. Nair relentlessly pursued this goal – one that was soon to get an unlikely boost. After India tested a nuclear device in 1998, the US and other western nations imposed stringent sanctions, banning trade in any “dual-use” technology that could be exploited by the military. ISRO suffered immensely. Suddenly, everything from personal computers to high-end electronics was unavailable. The last straw was when the US blocked the sale of Russian cryogenic engines needed to build the new geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV). ISRO was forced to go it alone and has since succeeded in building its own engines without help from other nations. The fully home-grown GSLV should be ready to fly in 2009. “Perhaps, looking back, I would say that the embargoes helped us develop the technology faster,” says Nair.
Besides a thirst for self-reliance, Nair has pursued Sarabhai’s vision of harnessing space for India’s development. India today has one of the world’s largest fleets of remote sensing and telecommunications satellites, helping the country reach its remote rural regions. About 200 tele-medicine centres link villages to urban hospitals, satellites beam educational material to 35,000 rural classrooms, and 300 village resource centres provide farmers and fishermen with the latest information on their crops, land and weather.
This focus on development meant that when a mission to the moon was proposed, Nair insisted that the cost be justified. Going to the moon for pride alone was not enough. “When we are spending these kinds of resources, it has to achieve certain objectives,” he says. So Chandrayaan-1 will create a unique, high-resolution map of the moon’s surface and minerals that will improve our understanding of the origin and evolution of the moon. The map will also locate regions rich in helium-3, which could fuel future nuclear fusion reactors. In a recent interview on Indian television, Nair was asked about a module carrying an Indian flag that Chandrayaan will drop onto the moon. The interviewer clearly wanted to elicit a jingoistic response, but Nair only concurred quietly that “it is a really thrilling experience”.
Nair is far more proud of pointing out that the mission will cost only $100 million, just a tenth of ISRO’s annual budget. “It is an investment,” he says. “We are going to give a thrust to the scientific development in the country.”
Was he nervous about the launch? “There is no point in getting nervous,” he says. “We should be prepared to face the unknowns. I’m sure every Indian, especially schoolchildren, will be thrilled to see that we are able to go so close to the moon.”
Profile
Madhavan Nair graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Kerala University in 1966 and a year later joined the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station in southern India. He became the project director for the polar satellite launch vehicle in 1988, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Trivandrum, Kerala, in 1999, and the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation in 2003. He has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates, including one from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 2004. He received the Padma Bhushan (India’s third-highest civilian honour) in 1998.