Science
Heroes

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on August 12, 1919 in Ahmedabad — into the industrialist Sarabhai family, one of India's most prominent. He could have chosen the easy path. Instead, he went to Cambridge, studied cosmic ray physics under Nobel laureate C.V. Raman's network, and returned to India in 1947 with a single mission: to put India in space. He founded the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in the same year India gained independence — at the age of 28, from his family home's garage.

In 1962, Sarabhai founded INCOSPAR — the Indian National Committee for Space Research — and identified a small fishing village on the Kerala coast called Thumba as India's first launch site. Its proximity to the magnetic equator made it ideal for sounding rocket research. The rocket nose cone arrived at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station on a bicycle. The first launch pad was a church. The first control room was the bishop's house. On November 21, 1963, a Nike-Apache sounding rocket borrowed from NASA lifted off from Thumba. India was in space.

When critics challenged him — why would one of the world's poorest nations spend money on space? — Sarabhai answered with precision: "We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society." He wasn't building a space programme for prestige. He was building it for weather forecasting, for communications, for agriculture — for the 500 million people who had nothing.

Sarabhai built the institutions that still define Indian science: ISRO, the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, the Electronics Corporation of India Limited, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He was 52 years old when he died of a sudden cardiac arrest on December 30, 1971 — in his sleep, on a working trip to Thiruvananthapuram. He left behind a programme that would reach Mars, land on the Moon's south pole, and launch over a hundred satellites in a single flight. Everything ISRO has ever done begins with him.

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was born on October 15, 1931 in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu — on a small island in the Palk Strait. His father was a boat owner and imam. As a child, Kalam distributed newspapers to supplement the family income before school. He was exceptional at mathematics. He studied aerospace engineering at what is now the Madras Institute of Technology. In 1958, he joined DRDO, then transferred to ISRO in 1969 — arriving at a young institution that was still learning what rockets were.

Kalam was appointed Project Director of the SLV-3 — the Satellite Launch Vehicle that would make India the sixth country in the world to achieve indigenous orbital launch capability. On August 10, 1979, the SLV-3 D1 flight failed — the Rohini satellite plunged into the Bay of Bengal. ISRO Chairman Satish Dhawan held the press conference himself, shielding his team. Kalam returned to his desk. Less than a year later, on July 18, 1980, SLV-3 D2 placed the Rohini RS-1 satellite in orbit. This time, Dhawan let Kalam face the press. India was the 6th nation with an indigenous launch vehicle. Kalam took the credit. Dhawan kept the dignity. The partnership between the two men was one of the finest examples of institutional leadership in Indian history.

After SLV-3, Kalam led India's Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) from 1983 — simultaneously developing Agni (ballistic missile), Prithvi (surface-to-surface), Akash (surface-to-air), Nag (anti-tank), and Trishul (low-level, quick-response). India became one of the few nations to develop an indigenous strategic deterrent from scratch. He was the architect of India's strategic capability as much as its space one. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1997.

Kalam became the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007 — the only scientist to hold that office. He called himself a teacher first and a scientist second. He spent his retirement visiting schools and colleges across India, telling students to dream. On July 27, 2015, he was delivering a lecture at IIM Shillong when he collapsed. He died doing what he loved most — inspiring young minds. He was 83. India lost one of the few people who genuinely believed that a child in Rameswaram could reach the stars — and proved it by example.

Ritu Karidhal Srivastava was born in 1975 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. She grew up watching coverage of space missions on television — the Voyager flybys, the Space Shuttle — and knew, with the certainty that only a child can have, that this was what she would do. She earned her Master's in Physics from the University of Lucknow, then her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore — one of India's most prestigious research institutions. She joined ISRO in 1997 at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore.

Her defining work came with Mangalyaan — the Mars Orbiter Mission launched in 2013. As Deputy Operations Director, Karidhal designed one of the mission's most critical systems: the autonomous fault detection and recovery architecture. The problem was fundamental to deep space: at Mars, the one-way communication time between ISRO's ground stations and the spacecraft is approximately 20 minutes. When Mangalyaan executed its Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) burn on September 24, 2014, the spacecraft had to operate completely alone for the most critical 24 minutes of its life. No human correction was possible. If anything went wrong — a sensor anomaly, a thruster irregularity — the spacecraft had to detect it, diagnose it, and correct it without any contact with Earth. Karidhal's systems did exactly that. The burn was perfect. India became the first Asian nation, and only the fourth in history, to reach Mars — and the only country to succeed on its first attempt.

She was subsequently appointed Mission Director of Chandrayaan-2 — only the second Indian woman to direct a major ISRO mission. The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, which continues operating today, has produced the most detailed maps of lunar water ice ever made and is mapping permanently shadowed craters that may hold resources for future lunar missions. The Vikram lander's crash was a setback; Karidhal's orbiter is a triumph that science papers are still being written about.

Ritu Karidhal represents something important for Indian science: she comes from a regular family in Lucknow, attended state universities, and built one of the most sophisticated autonomous spacecraft control systems in Asian space history. She received the ISRO Young Scientist Award in 2007. She has been listed among the most influential women in Indian science. But her real legacy is in the code — hundreds of thousands of lines of fault-handling logic running 300 million kilometres from Earth, keeping a spacecraft alive, alone, in the dark.

Sreedhara Panicker Somanath was born in July 1964 in Alappuzha (Alleppey), Kerala. He studied Mechanical Engineering at TKM College of Engineering, Kollam, completed advanced research at IISc Bangalore, and joined ISRO in 1985 — two years before the first successful PSLV flight. He spent the next three decades building the structural bones of India's rockets. As Lead Structural Engineer, he designed the structural systems of both PSLV and GSLV — the frameworks that hold a rocket together as it tears through the atmosphere at thousands of kilometres per hour, enduring forces and temperatures that would destroy almost any material. He was a foundational figure in GSLV Mk III (now LVM3), particularly the integration of the C25 cryogenic stage — the achievement that placed India in a tiny elite of nations that operate indigenous cryogenic propulsion.

He became Director of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) and then, in 2018, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) — the premier centre where all ISRO launch vehicles are designed and developed. Under his directorship, VSSC finalised the human-rating modifications for HLVM3 (Gaganyaan's vehicle) and began the full-scale development of the RLV. In January 2022, he was appointed Chairman of ISRO and Secretary, Department of Space.

What followed under Somanath's chairmanship reads like the most concentrated chapter in ISRO's history. August 23, 2023, 6:04 PM IST: Vikram lander touches down at the Moon's south pole. India becomes the first nation in history to land there, and only the fourth to achieve a soft lunar landing. September 2023: Aditya-L1 launches — India's first solar observatory, India's first spacecraft at a Lagrange point, now watching the Sun from 1.5 million kilometres away. January 1, 2024: XPoSat — the world's second X-ray polarimetry mission, only after NASA's IXPE. January 2025: SpaDeX docking — India becomes the fourth nation in history to dock spacecraft in orbit. 2025: NISAR — a ₹10,000-crore joint mission with NASA.

Somanath is simultaneously managing Gaganyaan — the crewed mission targeted for 2028 — and all its predecessor uncrewed test flights, the Chandrayaan-4 sample return mission, Shukrayaan (Venus), and the early architecture of BAS (Bharatiya Antariksh Station). He received the Padma Shri in 2024. When he is asked how ISRO consistently delivers world-class science at costs a fraction of comparable Western programmes, his answer is consistent: the right people, long institutional memory, and a culture that treats failure as data rather than catastrophe. The golden decade of Indian space is, unmistakably, his era.