India's First Rocket Rose From the Fishing Village of Thumba at 6.25 pm on 21 November 1963, With a Parish Church as Its Laboratory and a French Sodium Cloud as Its Payload

On 21 November 1963, at 6.25 in the evening, a two-stage Nike-Apache rocket rose from a beach at Thumba, a fishing village on the Arabian Sea coast just outside Thiruvananthapuram. It was India’s first sounding rocket, a small research rocket that climbs, takes readings and falls back, and ISRO dates the start of the Indian space programme to that flight. NASA’s chronology for 1963 records that it reached 106 miles (about 170 km) and was the first of four sodium-vapour experiments, in which a cloud of glowing sodium is released high up so that cameras on the ground can follow the speed and direction of the winds there.

The flight was a joint effort. NASA’s entry calls it the result of coordinated work by France, India and the United States, and ISRO’s 2023 anniversary release describes it as India’s maiden foray into space.

A beach on the magnetic equator

Thumba was chosen for its position, not its facilities. VSSC, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, explains that a narrow belt of electrons called the equatorial electrojet flows from west to east above the geomagnetic equator, at a height beyond the reach of instrumented balloons and too low for satellites. Rockets were the only way to measure it in place. A 1966 paper by the Thumba meteorological office, published in the India Meteorological Department’s journal MAUSAM, says the electrojet passes between 100 and 160 km over the magnetic equator and calls Thumba the first equipped rocket station from which it could be studied.

India’s national space committee, formed under Vikram Sarabhai in 1962, took up the electrojet as its first target, VSSC says, and chose Thumba for the work. The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) was established that year under United Nations sponsorship. On 14 January 1963 NASA announced an agreement with India’s Department of Atomic Energy. According to NASA’s chronology, the United States would supply nine Nike-Apache rockets for electrojet work and four Nike-Cajun rockets for wind measurement, plus loaned ground equipment and training, while India provided the site, staff and four sodium-vapour payloads. The sodium payload itself came from France. Pranav Sharma’s compilation of ISRO memoirs names Jacques Blamont of the French space agency CNES as the man who brought it, and a passage in it by M. Y. S. Prasad, a former director of the Sriharikota launch centre, dates India-France cooperation to that flight.

On 2 February 1968 the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, dedicated the station to the United Nations, VSSC records. Rockets from the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, France and Germany were later launched from it.

The church, the bishop and a Sunday service

The site had one obstacle. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who was among the young engineers at Thumba and later became President (his career is in a separate profile), told the story in several addresses, among them at Haridwar on 9 December 2006 and Mysore on 8 April 2007, and the two texts agree on the main points. The land held a series of fishing villages and an old church, St Mary Magdalene at Pallithura, with a Bishop’s House beside it. Sarabhai met politicians and officials and got nowhere, Kalam says, because of the nature of the place. He was sent to the Bishop of Trivandrum, Rev. Dr Peter Bernard Pereira.

It was a Saturday. The bishop smiled, Kalam recounts, and asked Sarabhai to come back the next day. After the Sunday service he told his congregation that a scientist wanted their church and his own house for space research, and that science “seeks truth by reasoning”. When he asked whether they could give God’s house for a scientific mission, Kalam says, there was a chorus of Amen. Kalam adds that a new church and new schools came up in record time. The 2013 PTI report says several fishermen families were moved to an adjacent stretch of coast, with the bishop persuading the villagers.

Church records add one detail. Catholic-Hierarchy lists Pereira as coadjutor bishop of Trivandrum from 4 July 1961 (a coadjutor assists the diocesan bishop and succeeds him) and as bishop from 1 October 1966. The archdiocese’s own history names Vincent Dereere as the first bishop, until 1966, and says Pereira was the first Indian to hold the post. It also says Kalam always remembers Pereira’s part in establishing VSSC, and that a parish with its parish church was ready to sacrifice for the pride of the nation.

VSSC’s pages say the church served at first as office and laboratories, that the first rocket systems were assembled and integrated inside it, and that the Bishop’s House was the office of the TERLS director. Kalam describes the church as the design centre and the place where rocket assembly started. The building became the VSSC Space Museum in 1985.

Launch day

The fullest account of the day itself is in Amrita Shah’s biography of Sarabhai, in an excerpt Scroll published in 2017. Shah writes that the rocket had been flown to Delhi on a US military transport, and the truck bringing it south to Cochin broke down on the road. When it arrived, the French payload turned out not to fit the American rocket, and Ratilal Panchal, an expert mechanic at the Physical Research Laboratory, was flown in from Ahmedabad. Praful Bhavsar and Kalam supervised as he adjusted it by hand. Photographers had been trained to film the cloud from four places: Kanyakumari, Palayamkottai, Kodaikanal and Kottayam.

More problems followed at the pad, in Shah’s telling: a hydraulic leak in the crane that was lifting the rocket onto its launcher, and a fault in the remote control that raised the launcher to the right angle, so a man was sent to work the controls by hand. Just before launch, Pramod Kale noticed a worker still at the launcher controls and pulled him away. The rocket left at 6.25. Minutes later an orange sodium cloud, lit by the setting sun, appeared high overhead. Sarabhai sent a telegram home that read “Gee whiz wonderful rocket shot”, Shah writes.

The Daily Excelsior’s 2013 history also gives 6.25 pm, and adds that a bicycle ferried rockets around the site and that on one occasion a payload went from the church to the launch pad on a cycle. At the sixtieth anniversary in 2023, the Press Information Bureau reported, Kale, who had read out the countdown for the first launch, announced it again for the commemorative one.

What the station became

The 1966 MAUSAM paper counts six sodium-vapour Nike-Apaches and four carrying magnetometers fired from Thumba by the end of 1964. Indian manufacture began almost at once. Sharma’s compilation quotes Sarabhai’s 1970 decade profile for an arrangement made in 1964 to build, under licence from a French firm, a two-stage rocket able to reach about 150 km with a payload of about 30 kg. It quotes the veteran scientist P. V. Manoranjan Rao that of 81 Centaure rockets launched from TERLS between 1965 and 1988, only ten were imported. The licence left behind a rocket fabrication facility and a propellant plant at Thumba. From 1970, VSSC says, Soviet weather rockets of the M-100 type were launched from Thumba every week, an arrangement that ran without a break until 1993.

India’s own Rohini series followed. VSSC says ISRO began launching Rohini sounding rockets from TERLS in 1967 and describes the 75 mm RH-75 as the first wholly Indian sounding rocket. ISRO’s sounding-rocket page calls the programme the bedrock on which its launch-vehicle technology was built, and says the experience was of immense value in mastering solid-propellant technology. The first launch vehicle that followed, SLV-3, is covered in the piece on Satish Dhawan and Sriharikota. In July 1972, VSSC says, TERLS, the Space Science and Technology Centre, the propellant plant, the rocket fabrication facility and other units were brought together as the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, under its first director, Brahm Prakash.

Where the accounts differ

NASA gives the first flight’s height as 106 miles. A 2023 report in The South First, citing the ISRO archive, gives 207 km, a 715 kg rocket and a 30 kg payload; tuput could not find the archive page itself. ISRO’s sounding-rocket page says the first rockets were imported Soviet M-100 and French Centaure vehicles and does not name the Nike-Apache, while VSSC, NASA and ISRO’s own 2023 anniversary release all name the Nike-Apache for 21 November 1963. On the Rohini series, VSSC dates the start to 1967, while ISRO’s page says indigenous sounding rockets were launched from 1965 and consolidated under the Rohini programme in 1975. Kalam’s speeches place the bishop’s decision in 1962, a year before the flight, and call Pereira the Bishop of Trivandrum, a title church records give him as head of the diocese from 1966.

Sixty years on

ISRO’s 2022 release calls the RH-200 the workhorse of its sounding rockets. On 23 November 2022 it flew its 200th consecutive successful launch from Thumba, at 11.55 am, watched by a former President of India. A year later, on 25 November 2023, ISRO marked the 60th anniversary at VSSC with an exhibition, a monument unveiled near the launch control centre and an RH-200 launch, which its release counts as the 2,452nd sounding rocket from Thumba. The Minister of State for Space, who inaugurated the programme, tied the anniversary to the year of Chandrayaan-3’s landing and the Aditya-L1 launch, and said in the PIB release that Sarabhai “might have been short of resources, but not short of confidence”.

The church building still stands as the VSSC Space Museum, where the garden holds a full-scale model of the PSLV. The museum’s page, read on 6 November 2026, says the RH-200 is launched from TERLS every month.