Ready To Fire by Nambi Narayanan

Author:Nambi Narayanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

HOME NOT SWEET

‘It may remain a dream; it may not take off at all.’

Problems arising out of internal politics, and the continuing stepmother treatment to liquid propulsion system, awaited me in India. I anticipated them, but did not allow them to weigh me down. In fact, before I packed my bags for India in March 1978, I had set my agenda to identifying a place and get infrastructure for a liquid propulsion centre; get project approval for Vikas, the liquid engine; get into the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project, which Dhawan had outlined by making Vikas a part of it.

Even as Kalam’s SLV project was on stream, Dhawan had initiated planning for a PSLV and a GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle). While PSLV and GSLV were still in the ideation stage, clearance had been given for a project parallel to SLV, the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV). M S R Dev, the ASLV project director, was an efficient scientist, a PhD from the US. But the vehicle was aerodynamically jinxed so much that every time it was test-launched it plunged into the sea. In ISRO, ASLV soon came to be known as ‘Always Sea-Loving Vehicle’.

That was a cruel joke, given the effort Dev and his team had put into the ASLV project. Today, with six-dimensional trajectory analysis software, we are able to accurately predict flight load, trajectory, overflying countries, areas of debris fall and much more.

With these modern tools, we now foresee problems through simulation, and prevent them before the launch. Back in the late 1970s, we were not good at 6D trajectory analysis, and it was all trial and error. ASLV may not be a shining showpiece in the ISRO brochures today, but our success with PSLV and future vehicles owes a lot to this sea lover, which taught us how not to make a rocket.

Space Science & Technology Centre had by now taken shape and, a year after Sarabhai’s death in 1971, it was renamed Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The centre had several groups working under it: a propellant group headed by Vasant R Gowarikar; a propulsion group with A E Muthunayagam as the head; an aerodynamics group under Y Janardhana Rao; a satellite group under U R Rao; a structures group headed by L Amba Rao; a control, guidance and instrumentation group with S C Gupta at the head; and a systems engineering group under D S Rane. M K Mukherjee headed the materials and quality control group and also general administration. Kalam, heading the SLV-3 project, reported to TERLS director Murthy. Muthunayagam had the additional responsibility of the mechanical engineering group. I reported to him, in the propulsion group.

Relations between various heads were far from cordial; some had a cold war, some others fought openly. Some of the bitter fights were between propulsion group head Muthunayagam, my immediate boss, and propellant group head Gowarikar. Both had ambitions to be the director of VSSC first, and then the ISRO chairman. While Gowarikar became the VSSC director

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