The book Space: The India Story by veteran science journalist Dinesh Sharma describes, in an engaging way, India’s space odyssey, while not exactly being a chronicle of seven decades of the journey.
The author has divided the book in two parts — ‘India in Space’ and ‘Indians in Space’, the latter discussing three Indians who have been up there, —Rakesh Sharma, Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. The book has its positive and negative aspects.
The origins
First, the positives. The book is a wealth of information. In the first chapter, there is a deep background about how ISRO, the Indian space agency, took root and germinated in the soils of Cold War geopolitics and the USA-USSR space race, and how the Soviet Union extended a helping hand to its ally, India. We learn about India’s baby steps into space, with the launch of sounding rockets from Thumba Equatorial Launching Station (TERLS).
Early rockets
The second chapter is an interesting account of India’s early rockets — the Satellite Launch Vehicles (SLV), whose consistent failures earned it the unflattering sobriquet — Sea Loving Vehicle, as they all fell into the sea. We learn about how India needed a tethered High-Altitude Balloon made by Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) to relay signals to the transmission tower in Madras (now Chennai) — high winds wrenched the balloon off its tether and Doordarshan could not broadcast its launch live
In those days, problems were commonplace — during an early SLV launch, the remote-controlled ‘umbilical cord’ would not detach, and a technician had to climb up the launch tower to detach the cable, flouting safety norms. SLV’s successor, the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (Always Sea Loving Vehicle) also failed regularly and had to be given up, before a project for a larger rocket, the PSLV, was taken up.
Satellite story
The third chapter, on satellites, too delves deep into history, the launch of India’s first satellite, Aryabhatta, from the Russian soil, the ₹3-crore Indo-Soviet Satellite Project (later renamed Indian Scientific Satellite Project), the early Bhaskara and INSAT satellites.
The fourth and final chapter of the first part of the book takes the reader through the Chandrayaan (initially called ‘Somayaan’ but renamed by Prime Minister Vajpayee) and Mangalyaan projects.
Key characters
These chronicles are sprinkled with discussions about the critical roles played by India’s space heroes, sung and unsung, such as Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan, APJ Abdul Kalam, UR Rao and RV Ramanan.
Bio sketches
The second part of the book is divided into five chapters, the first three being biographical sketches of Rakesh Sharma, Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. The author describes how their thirst for space took them there, how Rakesh Sharma lost his six-year-old daughter while training for his space journey but persevered regardless. The description Kalpana Chawla — Citizen of the Milky Way — perishing in the Columbia tragedy barely 65 km above earth, while her parents waited for her splashdown, is truly moving. The discussion on Sunita Williams stops at the point of her getting stranded in the International Space Station, as the book was completed before her return recently.
The fourth chapter in this section is on Gaganyaan — India’s upcoming human space flight — which throws light on how the government suddenly turned in its favour, after years of being against it. The final chapter, on ‘The Way Ahead’, speaks of India’s ambitious projects— Gaganyaan, the next Chandrayaans, the Venus probe Sukrayaan, the grand aim of building the Bharat Antariksh Station and sending an Indian to the moon. Pain points.
Now, the negatives of the book.
Indeed, after reading the book, you’d thank the author for painstakingly collecting information and weaving it into this book. However, there is a lingering disappointment that there is nothing in the book that is not already available in the public domain. A keen researcher can get almost all of the information in the book from sources like Wikipedia.
One would have liked to see a personal touch from the author — such as parts of his interviews that may not have been published or corridor whispers that he may have heard during his journalistic career. The author gives credit to SPK Gupta, former PTI Moscow correspondent, for sharing all his notes with him, but if these notes contain information hitherto undisclosed, the reader gets nothing of it.
Also, quite a few aspects of India’s space story have been dismissed with a passing reference— the incredibly difficult and successful Aditya L-1 mission, the Nambinarayanan and Devas controversies, the tensions in ISRO’s top brass (Madhavan Nair vs K Radhakrishnan). These are some yawning gaps in the book.
Book details
Title: Space: The India Story
Author: Dinesh Sharma
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Price: ₹599
Published on April 20, 2025
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