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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  Alignments in space
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Alignments in space

The history of origins of the Indian space programme reflect the nation's precarious but fruitful foreign policy plays during the Cold War

India’s space programme was helped by both the US and USSR. Photo: IsroPremium
India’s space programme was helped by both the US and USSR. Photo: Isro

There were at least two key political motives driving the Space Race between the US and the USSR. Firstly, it was propaganda for the citizens of their own countries, convincing them of their own nation’s supremacy. Secondly, the Race seemed an ideal way to win over a large number of nations which watched this Cold War rivalry with great eagerness. For many of these nations, the Space Race had as much to do with political dominance as it was about advances in the field of science, technology and engineering. For nations which were yet to definitely pick a side in the Cold War, the Space Race became something of a beauty pageant to pick a winner from.

Meanwhile, both superpowers were constantly “wooing" newly-independent “third world" nations to join them as allies. The Race was about conquering both space and Earth.

India was a particularly valuable prize. But India played its hands very safely and didn’t choose one side completely over the other. Being one of the pioneers of the Non-Alignment Movement, India seemed to show other, smaller, newly-independent nations that it was possible to navigate a path between both superpowers, bargaining as it went along.

Nowhere has this approach manifested itself more than in the history of the genesis of the Indian space programme. Propelled, no doubt, by the dedication and hard work of Indian manpower, and a political will to have an indigenous space programme, India, from time to time, was helped by both the US and USSR.

When it was decided that India will have its own international rocket launch station at Thumba in Kerala in 1963, three batches of young engineers were sent to the US to be trained at Nasa before they come back and set up TERLS: the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station.

One of the critical pieces of equipment that was provided to India was the Doppler Velocity and Positioning System (DOVAP), which was a 40-feet-long trailer housing a ground station built by Nasa. This was transferred to India under a collaborative agreement with Nasa. The first rocket launch from Thumba was a Nike Apache “sounding rocket", which was also supplied by Nasa. Thus, India’s fledgling space programme is indebted to the Americans in more than one way.

Apart from the Indian payload, “sounding" rockets from many other countries, including the US, Russia, Japan, France, Germany, were also launched from Thumba, as part of a broad network of international collaborations.

The three launch pads at TERLS had facilities for a variety of sounding rockets, including the French Centaure Dragon, the Indian Centaure and Rohini, Britain’s Skua and Petrel, America’s Nike-Apache, Nike-Tomahawk and Arcas, and Russia’s M-100. Since the successful launch of the American Nike-Apache in 1963, scientists from France, Germany, Japan, Russia and Bulgaria participated in numerous scientific experiments at Thumba.

With the USSR, India had its first significant collaboration later in 1970. Under this collaboration, India agreed to launch M-100 rockets from Thumba every week in synchronization with Russian sites so that a simultaneous set of data on meteorological forecasts could be obtained. India launched more than a thousand M-100 rockets between 1970 and 1993. The Soviet Union, of course, has been a major contributor to India’s space effort. Foremost in this effort was Soviet technical assistance in building and in actually launching India’s first set of satellites.

On 19 April 1975, the Soviet Union launched India’s first satellite, Aryabhata. Designed purely for scientific experiments, the satellite was built by India, but the Soviets provided technical assistance and components such as solar cells, batteries, thermal paints, and tape recorders. This clearly depicts how India managed to balance out its relationship with the superpowers for its own benefit, at least as far as its space programme was concerned.

But beyond the US and USSR, India also realized the value of other relationships. Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space programme, signed an agreement with Sud Aviation, a French firm, to manufacture Centuare sounding rockets under license and to ultimately supply it to France.

Also to be kept in mind is that on 2 February 1968, TERLS was officially dedicated to the UN by the then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The very next year, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) was established.

By 1970, it became clearer that India was tilting more towards the Soviets than the US. Russia played an important role in India’s space journey, and space remains one of the key pillars of the strategic partnership between the two countries. Over the years, India’s indigenous space programme has benefited from Russian technical and scientific assistance.

The first man to travel to space—Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—predicted a future collaboration between the two nations back in 1961, when he spent eight days in India. “I think that sometime Soviet and Indian cosmonauts will research unexplored expanses of space together," Gagarin said at a meeting in Delhi. Two decades later, Rakesh Sharma made the nation proud, becoming the first Indian to travel to outer space, on board the Soyuz T-11 spacecraft, with a Russian commander and a Russian flight engineer.

That didn’t mean that the US was out of the picture. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, or SITE, was a landmark. SITE was an experimental satellite communications project launched in India in 1975, designed jointly by Nasa and Isro. The project made available informational television programmes to rural India. The main objectives of the experiment were to educate the poor people of India on various issues via satellite broadcasting, and also to help India gain technical experience in the field of satellite communications.

The experiment ran for one year, from 1 August 1975 to 31 July 1976, covering more than 2,400 villages in 20 districts of six Indian states and territories (Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan). The television programmes were produced by All India Radio and broadcast by Nasa’s ATS-6 satellite stationed above India for the duration of the project. The project was supported by various international agencies such as the UNDP, Unesco, Unicef and ITU. The experiment was successful, as it played a major role in helping develop India’s own satellite programme, INSAT.

Thus, as far as the space programme is concerned, India played its non-alignment card through the duration of the Cold War. By maintaining relations with both superpowers, India was able to dip into the competencies of both the US and USSR—to its own benefit.

Martand Jha is a junior research fellow at the Center for Russian and Central Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

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Published: 21 Oct 2017, 11:43 PM IST
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