Satish Dhawan Led ISRO From 1972 to 1984, Saw SLV-3 Reach Orbit on 18 July 1980, and Has Had the Sriharikota Spaceport Named for Him Since 5 September 2002

Satish Dhawan chaired the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) from 1972 to 1984. During that time India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV-3, put the Rohini RS-1 satellite into orbit from Sriharikota on 18 July 1980, a flight ISRO says made India the sixth member of an exclusive club of space-faring nations. On 5 September 2002, about eight months after Dhawan died, the Sriharikota centre was renamed Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR.

Before that he was an aerodynamics researcher and the director of the Indian Institute of Science, and colleagues have left detailed accounts of how he ran the space programme.

A Srinagar-born engineer at Caltech

Born in Srinagar on 25 September 1920, Dhawan was educated in India and the United States, ISRO’s biography says. His father, Devi Dayal, retired as a judge of the High Court in Lahore, according to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) memorial tribute by Roddam Narasimha and Venkatasubbiah Siddhartha.

The University of the Punjab in Lahore gave him a BA in physics and mathematics, an MA in English literature and, in 1945, a BE in mechanical engineering. A government scholarship took him to the United States in 1946, and he earned a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota in 1947. Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) awarded him an aeronautical engineering degree in 1949 and a PhD in aeronautics and mathematics in 1951, with Hans Liepmann as his adviser.

Measuring the friction of air in milligrams

Air flowing over a wing or a plate is slowed in a thin layer next to the surface. That is the boundary layer, and the drag it creates on the surface is called skin friction. His thesis, titled Direct Measurements of Skin Friction, describes a device that senses the force on a very small movable section of a flat plate. Forces from about 1 to 100 milligrams could be read on it.

Results in slow air flowing smoothly (laminar) and in churning air (turbulent) agreed well with the calculations of Blasius and von Karman, two classical names in the field. Next came high subsonic speeds, up to about Mach 0.8, and a few measurements in supersonic flow. NASA’s records list the work as NACA Technical Report 1121, dated January 1953.

With Liepmann and Anatol Roshko he also co-authored NACA Technical Report 1100, dated January 1952 on NASA’s server. It reports measurements at Mach 1.3 to 1.5 of how shock waves reflect off a flat surface and how far a shock is felt upstream, for both laminar and turbulent boundary layers. The NAE tribute calls it one of the first studies of shock wave and boundary layer interaction and says it still appears in textbooks.

The laboratories in Bangalore

Joining the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore in 1951, Dhawan became professor and head of aeronautical engineering in 1955. Narasimha and Siddhartha say he built high-speed aerodynamics and boundary-layer laboratories there, working on transition, separated flows and transonic flow, at low cost and with ingenious adaptations. ISRO’s biography credits him with setting up the first supersonic wind tunnel in India. Indian scientists consider him the father of experimental fluid dynamics research in the country, it adds.

A 1958 paper in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, written with R. Narasimha, treated the change from laminar to turbulent flow as the intermittent appearance of turbulent spots. Average velocity profiles during that change fit a single family controlled by one parameter, the intermittency factor, which measures how much of the time the flow is turbulent.

As for the directorship, ISRO dates it from 1962, the institute’s own centenary page from 1963, and the NAE tribute says 1962 or 1963. All three say he stayed until 1981. Under him, the tribute says, the institute grew from 11 departments and 5 sections to about 40 departments and units, and no director has served longer. Boundary-layer research went on even while he headed the space programme, ISRO adds.

A cable to California

Dhawan spent 1971 and 1972 as a visiting professor at Caltech. Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of the Indian space programme, died in 1971 at 52; the story of his work is in our profile of Sarabhai. M. G. K. Menon led the programme for a few months afterwards, The Week reports.

Ramachandra Guha writes in Scroll that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi cabled Dhawan on the advice of P. N. Haksar, and that Dhawan set two conditions: he would remain director of IISc, and ISRO’s headquarters would move from Ahmedabad to Bangalore. Guha has her accept both and let him finish his research year at Caltech first. A further condition appears in the NAE tribute, that the programme be organised as he proposed, with a Space Commission, a Department of Space and ISRO all headed by one person. From 1972 he chaired both ISRO and the Space Commission and served as Secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Space, according to ISRO’s biography.

Bangalore was chosen partly for its climate and its access to IISc and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, K. Kasturirangan told The Week. Thiruvananthapuram kept the launch vehicle centre and Ahmedabad the Space Applications Centre. Dhawan, The Week adds, drew his salary from IISc and took a token one rupee from ISRO.

His first task, writes R. Aravamudan in a book Guha quotes, ISRO: A Personal History, was to bring order by joining scattered teams, defining roles and setting up centres around programmes. Outside technical reviews, particularly from universities, became a habit, the NAE tribute says.

SLV-3 and the failure of 10 August 1979

Weighing 17 tonnes and standing 22 metres tall, SLV-3 was an all-solid, four-stage vehicle able to place a payload of the 40 kg class in low Earth orbit, ISRO says. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam led the project. Rashtrapati Bhavan’s profile names him project director, while Narasimha’s obituary of Kalam calls the post project manager. His own career is in our article on the Missile Man.

The first flight, on 10 August 1979, carried a Rohini technology payload. By Kalam’s account the first stage performed as predicted, the second stage started, and within seconds the vehicle began to tumble and fell into the Bay of Bengal. ISRO’s launch list marks the mission unsuccessful, and its SLV page calls the flight only partially successful.

Kalam recalled in 2002 that Dhawan summoned him to a press conference, said beforehand that he would handle it himself, and wanted the senior scientists present. There was a full room, pointed questions and criticism. Dhawan told the reporters that the launch was a partial success and the first mission to prove several technologies together, Kalam said. One of the lines he gives to Dhawan is “We have tumbled but not fallen flat.” A failure analysis board followed.

Narasimha’s account adds an internal scene. Kalam wanted to resign, but Dhawan persuaded him to stay. After a long meeting on the causes, Kalam formally took responsibility, the room went silent, and Dhawan ended it by saying, “I am going to put Kalam in orbit!“

18 July 1980

Lift-off from Sriharikota came on 18 July 1980. Kalam described a textbook trajectory. After nearly 600 seconds he judged that every stage, the fourth included, had given the velocity needed, and he announced over the network that the vehicle had delivered the satellite to the right altitude. Rohini RS-1 was placed in orbit, ISRO’s page records.

Reports of the satellite’s mass differ. A 2003 speech by Kalam calls it a 40 kg satellite, Narasimha gives 35 kg in a 400 km orbit, and ISRO’s page states only the vehicle’s 40 kg class capacity.

Two accounts of what happened next come from Kalam himself. His 2002 lecture has Dhawan asking him to handle the press conference with the team. In 2003 he said that amid the cheering Dhawan took him aside, and the two sat on the launcher at the pad watching the waves of the Bay of Bengal. “Kalam, you know you have been working hard for the last eight years,” Dhawan told him, in Kalam’s words. Narasimha says Dhawan chose to stay in the background and sent Kalam to the press.

Two more SLV-3 flights followed, on 31 May 1981 and 17 April 1983, each carrying a Rohini satellite, according to ISRO’s list. Success in the project showed the way to the later ASLV, PSLV and GSLV rockets, ISRO says. A PSLV from the same island later carried 104 satellites in one flight.

How colleagues described his way with credit and blame

Two press conferences taught Kalam a lesson, he said in the 2002 lecture. When success comes after hard work, the leader should give the credit to the team. When failure comes, the leader should absorb it and protect the team. He added that he found this nowhere in the management textbooks of the time.

P. Balaram’s 2002 obituary of Dhawan in Current Science, as Guha reports it, says Dhawan shouldered responsibility in failure and stayed at the sidelines in success. Narasimha’s tribute in the NAE volume adds that he expected rigorous scientific integrity from senior staff.

One caution applies to every version of the SLV-3 story. Kalam’s memory, set down in speeches 23 and 24 years afterwards, is the main source for the press-conference scene. Dates in this article come from ISRO’s launch list.

The name on the spaceport

Dhawan died on 3 January 2002 at 81. Among his honours the NAE tribute lists the Padma Vibhushan in 1981 and the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1999, with presidency of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1977 to 1979 and a Distinguished Alumnus award from Caltech in 1969.

On 5 September 2002, the Department of Space’s release says, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee unveiled a plaque at Sriharikota from his residence in New Delhi, naming the centre Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR. He called Dhawan “one of the most distinguished Indians of our times”. Kasturirangan, the release notes, spoke of paying tribute to Dhawan on Teachers’ Day. Before that the centre was popularly known as SHAR, the Sriharikota Range, and the acronym stayed, according to the centre’s own website, which says the renaming was in fond memory of Dhawan.

Kalam, by then President, told the ISRO community at Sriharikota on 10 October 2003 that it was his first visit since the renaming and that 17 launch vehicles had flown from the range. Sriharikota was chosen in 1969 and became operational with the Rohini-125 sounding rocket on 9 October 1971, the centre’s site adds.

A tribal community, the Yanadis, had lived on the island, and the Department of Space’s 2005 release says they were resettled within it and given jobs and schooling. Guha reports that Dhawan’s daughter, Jyotsna Dhawan, says her father was troubled by the displacement and worked to secure some reparations.

In 2013 the Department of Space and ISRO set up the Satish Dhawan Fellowship at Caltech, which sends one aerospace engineering graduate a year from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology to the laboratory where he studied. Its first recipient was due to start in October 2013.