Aryabhata, India's First Satellite, Was Built in Bengaluru Sheds for About Rs 3 Crore and Launched on a Soviet Rocket on 19 April 1975

India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, lifted off on 19 April 1975 from Kapustin Yar, a Soviet launch site in the Astrakhan region, on a Soviet Kosmos-3M rocket. ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, says the 360 kg spacecraft was completely designed and fabricated in India, and the people who built it did so in a cluster of industrial sheds at Peenya, on the edge of Bengaluru.

A Soviet offer, and an American rocket set aside

The first plan was a 100 kg satellite launched on a US Scout rocket, according to the Lowy Institute’s history of the project. In 1971, India’s ambassador in Moscow passed on a message that the Soviet Academy of Sciences was ready to help launch India’s first satellite. The Aerospace Nerd blog dates the Moscow meeting that settled a free launch to August 1971, with about 20 Soviet scientists and four from ISRO talking for four days.

Vikram Sarabhai, who founded the space programme, died in December 1971 at the age of 52, and the follow-up stalled. M. G. K. Menon, then interim head of ISRO, met the Soviet side at Trivandrum in February 1972, the Lowy Institute reports. The Federal gives 10 May 1972 as the day the launch agreement was signed, by M. Keldysh, president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and Menon. A 2007 conference paper by authors that include an engineer from the Soviet Yuzhnoye design office, which worked on the project, gives the same date. It says the agreement gave Indian scientists advisory and technical help for a scientific satellite launched on a Soviet booster.

A Soviet article from 1984, translated by NASA, adds that the 1972 agreement was signed in Moscow between the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Indian space organisation. It was followed by two more, in 1975 and 1979, covering Indian-built satellites launched from Soviet territory on Soviet rockets.

None of these sources prints the agreement’s text. Some websites say India gave the Soviet Union port access for tracking ships in return. No document seen for this article supports that, so it is left out.

Four sheds at Peenya

U. R. Rao, then at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, was the Indian project director. His Soviet counterpart was V. M. Kovtunenko, The Federal reports. In The South First’s account of Rao’s life, the Soviet team at first wanted India to build only an instrument, and Rao pressed for a whole satellite instead. The same account says the Soviet side then offered to launch it free.

Rao moved the work to Bengaluru. He obtained four asbestos-roofed sheds in the Peenya Industrial Area after persuading Karnataka’s Industries Secretary, Satish Chandra, The Federal says. The facility was formally inaugurated in September 1972, and later grew by two more sheds and a staff of 150. Satish Dhawan, who took over from Sarabhai as ISRO’s chairman, was in charge of the wider programme during the build, and the U R Rao Satellite Centre says he watched the launch at Kapustin Yar.

Rao told FactorDaily in 2017 that the team “worked from sheds” and had two and a half years. He wrote to universities offering to take two of their best students, interviewed them in the auditorium of the Indian Institute of Science, and said the team reached about 250 people. The U R Rao Satellite Centre records that a young team with no earlier experience of space hardware built four models over three years. The South First adds that, with no room to spare, Rao put the data reception centre in a lavatory.

The Federal reports that Menon secured Rs 3 crore in government funding from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and The Tribune also puts the budget at about Rs 3 crore. The Federal, citing an interview with Rao, adds that he got some components from NASA on a loan-and-replacement basis through his own contacts.

What was on board

The spacecraft was a 26-sided body about 1.4 metres across, according to NASA’s HEASARC and the U R Rao Satellite Centre, with solar cells on 24 of the faces producing 46 watts. It carried nickel-cadmium batteries and a small gas-jet system to spin it up. ISRO lists its orbit as 563 by 619 km, inclined at 50.7 degrees to the equator.

The three experiments covered X-ray astronomy, aeronomy (the physics of the upper atmosphere) and solar physics. The Satellite Centre describes them as instruments to measure cosmic X-rays and neutrons and gamma rays from the Sun, plus a sensor for the ionosphere. It also notes that Aryabhata was one of the first satellites to use CMOS chips, a low-power type, on a large scale.

Testing was hands-on. A half-size model went up on a balloon to about 25 km from Hyderabad on 5 May 1973. In January 1975 an engineering model was carried by helicopter over Sriharikota.

The power failure

What happened after launch depends on which record is read. NASA’s HEASARC says a power failure halted the experiments after 4 days in orbit and that all signals were lost after 5 days of operation. The Lowy Institute puts the switch-off of the scientific instruments on the fifth day. The U R Rao Satellite Centre says only one payload could be run for the first few orbits because of a problem in the power distribution system, and that the rest of the spacecraft worked well.

ISRO’s own page says the spacecraft’s main frame stayed active until March 1981 and that the satellite re-entered the atmosphere on 10 February 1992, nearly 17 years after launch. NASA’s HEASARC gives 11 February.

The name, the note and the stamps

ISRO says the satellite was named after the Indian astronomer Aryabhata. The Federal and the Lowy Institute both report that in early 1975 Rao and others put three names to Indira Gandhi and she chose Aryabhata. They disagree on the other two: The Federal lists Jawahar and Maitri, the Lowy Institute Mitra and Jawahar. The fifth-century astronomer himself is the subject of a separate tuput article.

The satellite later appeared on the back of the Rs 2 note. The U R Rao Satellite Centre says the image was on the note from 1976 to 1997, and The Tribune gives the same years. The Reserve Bank’s museum page places Aryabhatta on the Rs 2 note in its set of the 1980s, which emphasised science and technology. A collectors’ catalogue lists a satellite reverse on 1977 notes signed by Governor M. Narasimham. The sources agree on the note and differ on the first year.

India Post issued a 25-paise stamp on 20 April 1975, the day after the launch, with 3 million printed, according to Indian Philatelics. The Soviet Union issued a 10-kopeck Aryabhata stamp on 15 October 1976 in a five-stamp set called International Co-operation in Space Research, StampWorld records.

What came next

ISRO’s page for Bhaskara-I describes it as India’s first experimental remote sensing satellite. It weighed 442 kg and was launched on 7 June 1979 on a Soviet Intercosmos rocket, with television cameras and a microwave radiometer for studying oceans. ISRO says its camera images were used in hydrology and forestry. Bhaskara-II followed in November 1981, the 2007 conference paper notes.

India’s own rocket came in between. The first flight of the SLV-3 in August 1979 was only partly successful, ISRO’s launch vehicle page says. On 18 July 1980 an SLV-3 from Sriharikota put the 35 kg Rohini RS-1 into orbit, and ISRO counts that flight as making India the sixth member of the space-faring club. The missions that later made ISRO known for low cost are in the piece on its frugal engineering. The partnership with Russia continued into human spaceflight with Rakesh Sharma’s 1984 flight. A later Russian deal, for cryogenic engines signed in 1991, ended differently and is covered in the cryogenic engine story.

Aryabhata itself stayed in orbit until February 1992.