The story of India's first rocket
- a story that didn't make it to our textbooks
With all the excitement around the Chandrayaan-3 landing on the moon, I started dreaming about rockets (yes! I can be strange that way). Since I could not get the image of the rockets out of my head, I went digging around to find out how India fired its very first rocket. Where does one go to find such stories? (as any lazy researcher would do, I too began with Google and Wikipedia. But then my daughters gave me a gentle rap on my head and directed me to the largest library known to mankind - Amazon and Flipkart).
As luck would have it, they had quite a few books on the topic and I had a bit of time on my hands. So I read all of them. At the end of it, I was bursting to share these stories with the world at large, especially because many of these hardly make it to our textbooks.
Tuck in and enjoy the ride.
What does a beach have to do with rockets?
I’d like to start the story with ‘Long long time ago….’ but I don’t really know where you stand on a duration of 61 years. It would be a really long time ago, if you think of your grandparents as really old. Or, 61 years is just a few years to skip back to.
Anyway, this is the November of 1962. The place is a fishing hamlet in Kerala. Let me give you a tour of the place. Think of a large beach, a few boats and fishing nets strewn all over. If you looked out into the sea, you might find some friendly fishermen waving from their boats. If you walked on the beach, you’d bump into kids building castles in the sand. To your side would be a few huts, some cottages, one village school and a church. This village was called Thumba.
A young scientist strolls into this beach town. His name is Dr.Vikram Sarabhai. He loves the beach (and in later years, would often go for a cool dip and a swim in the sea here). But for now in our story, he walks towards the cottage of the bishop of the local church. The bishop whom we shall call by his real name - Reverend Father Peter Bernard Pereira (yes, that can be a tongue-twister). This bishop is very respected by the fishermen and villagers of Thumba.
At the time of our story, the bishop is sitting in his cottage with a book in hand, when he hears a knock on his door. He looks up to see the young scientist we earlier met at the beach. Vikram Sarabhai introduces himself and the bishop politely invites him into his home.
The two men sit on a couple of comfortable cane chairs and chat for a little while about the weather and other such little things. After a little bit of chit-chat, Dr. Sarabhai asks the Bishop something extraordinary – “I come here to ask you if you can give me your church, your cottage and all the fishermen’s huts in this village for India to launch its first rocket? We’d like to use this space for laboratories and offices for our space scientists.”
Why this village? The village of Thumba is located near the magnetic equator of the earth. Scientists found this village a great location to conduct experiments on the atmosphere. The magnetic equator is a little different from the geographic equator we have read in our textbooks.
Dr.Vikram Sarabhai also tells the bishop that with the rockets that India would send, Indian farmers could learn to grow more food, students could watch educational shows on TV and all Indians could speak to each other on phones (at this time, phones were not common in India, as it was really really expensive to make calls).
I am not sure what you would have felt if a stranger came to your house and asked you to vacate it (apart from calling the local police or a detective like Tintin). But whatever it was that the bishop felt, he shows no emotion on his face. He calmly tells Dr.Sarabhai to come back the next day to the church (at the Sunday mass), where he would get his answer.
The next morning, the bishop walks up to the podium and asks all the villagers present at the church if they were willing to give up their houses and the church. I would imagine that the fishermen looked at each other with an expression like ‘has the bishop gone dotty? why would we give it all up?’. But the truth could not be stranger.
The villagers stay silent for a little while, and ponder about the rockets that would help India. They answer with a loud ‘Yes’. Each villager wants to his or her bit to help India make a big leap forward. Dr.Sarabhai, in turn, promises all the fishermen a new space for their homes, a new church, a new school and jobs at the science laboratories (if they wanted to try their hand at it).
Dr.Sarabhai, in the meanwhile, calls NASA and requests for a sounding rocket (called Apache) to be sent to India by ship. He convinces them that studying the earth’s atmosphere from a place like Thumba was going to help NASA scientists learn new things. NASA agrees.
Picture this: A scientist strapping some of the rocket parts to his bicycle - his friend holding the parts tightly by hand - and the two of them walking together, one pushing the cycle and the other holding the rocket parts carefully. That was life at Thumba.
India launches its first sounding rocket in Nov 1963 from the beaches of Thumba.
Picture this: A group of villagers clad in dhoti and lungis standing on a beach. All of them looking up into the sky. A sounding rocket takes off. It’s a bit like Diwali and the firecrackers can be seen above the coconut trees on the beach.
Trivia: Chandrayaan was NOT India’s first rocket.
Travel Tips: You can visit this church today. It is no longer ISRO’s laboratory. It has now been converted into a space museum and contains rockets designed by Prof.Abdul Kalam and other ISRO scientists. It is a 20 min drive from Trivandrum airport in Kerala.