The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Man looked to stars on quest for self-sufficiency in India
Space program pioneer sought to improve rural areas.
The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India’s space program was being born.
And helping to steer it was U.R. Rao, who believed that science — particularly aerospace science — could help his country solve its food shortages and eradicate its poverty. He would begin toiling there, pursuing his vision with other scientists, from offices in a converted bishop’s house.
Eighteen years later, on Nov. 21, 1980, their efforts bore fruit when the former churchyard became the scene of India’s first rocket launch, giving the country a foothold in an exclusive club of space-faring nations.
Rao, who helped India propel its first satellites into space as a chairman of the program, died July 24 at 85 at his home in Bengaluru, India, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, which did not provide a cause.
The location for India’s first control center — a remote fishing hamlet on the Indian Ocean — was chosen for its proximity to the equator. With its magnetic properties, the area was of great fascination for scientists interested in the ionosphere, which plays an important role in long-distance radio communication.
Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, which originally sought scientific advances in space exploration for military purposes, India looked to the stars on a quest for self-sufficiency.
Rao worked alongside Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan, the first leaders of the Indian Space Research Organization, the country’s equivalent of NASA, to establish a complex in Bangalore
and secure a budget from the Indian government. By the time he took over as chairman in 1984, he was overseeing 14,000 employees.
But critics in other countries would ask why, with all its problems of poverty and overpopulation, of malnutrition and poor health and illiteracy, India should be spending millions of rupees to go into space.
The question would send Rao into a passionate discourse about the practical benefits of space satellites to ordinary villagers. He told The New York Times in 1983 that satellites would bring television signals to even the most rural parts of India. Meteorological data about weather and floods would help farmers manage their crops. Long-distance calls from one Indian city to another would take seconds instead of (with poor connections) hours.
The economy would grow, he said. Communication would be better. It would “change the face of rural India.”
In 1975, Rao led the team that built India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, named for an ancient Indian astronomer and mathematician. The satellite, launched in the Soviet Union aboard a Soviet-made rocket, conducted experiments to detect low-energy X-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet rays in the ionosphere.
Rao was credited with sending 20 more satellites into space, including some of the first to combine communication and meteorological capabilities. Other satellites took crop inventories and looked for signs of underground water reserves. Soil erosion and snow runoff were monitored to help forecast floods.
He was also present in March 1984 when India’s first astronaut was launched into space. The mission: to practice yoga.
The astronaut, Rakesh Sharma, 35, was tasked with seeing if yoga exercises could help astronauts tolerate motion sickness and muscle fatigue, problems that come with weightlessness.