Vikram Sarabhai Founded a Cosmic-Ray Laboratory at 28, Then Began India's Space Programme in a Church at Thumba, Where the First Rocket Flew on 21 November 1963

Vikram Sarabhai was 28 when he founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad on 11 November 1947. On 21 November 1963, sixteen years and ten days later, the first sounding rocket (a small research rocket that climbs, takes readings and falls back) went up from Thumba on the Kerala coast. ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, calls him the father of the Indian space programme. Historians who have gone through the record dispute some parts of that picture, and those are set out below.

A mill-owning family and a thesis on cosmic rays

Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 in Ahmedabad, one of eight children of Ambalal Sarabhai and Sarla Devi. ISRO’s biography describes the family as a rich and important Jain business family, and says Ambalal owned many mills in Gujarat.

He took the Natural Sciences Tripos (the Cambridge degree examination) at St John’s College in 1940. As the Second World War escalated he came home and joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where he began research on cosmic rays under C. V. Raman. Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that strike the Earth from space. Sarabhai went back to Cambridge in 1945 and received his PhD in 1947 for a thesis titled “Cosmic Ray investigation in Tropical Latitudes”, according to ISRO. PRL says his work on how cosmic-ray intensity varies led him on to interplanetary space, the Sun’s effects on Earth and geomagnetism.

A laboratory that began in his house

The Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) started in a modest way at his residence, the Retreat, with cosmic-ray experiments. It was formally established on 11 November 1947 at the M. G. Science College in Ahmedabad, with support from the Karmkshetra Educational Foundation and the Ahmedabad Education Society. PRL’s own history says his parents created the foundation, and ISRO’s biography adds that he persuaded trusts controlled by his family and friends to fund the place.

K. R. Ramanathan joined as the first director after retiring from the India Meteorological Department, and added a department of atmospheric physics. Both men sat on the laboratory’s first Council of Management in 1950. Raman laid the foundation stone of the campus in 1952, and Jawaharlal Nehru opened it in 1954.

The same year as PRL, according to the IIM Ahmedabad archives, Sarabhai founded the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association. In the 1950s the Government of India decided to set up a national institute of management, and Sarabhai lobbied for it to go to Ahmedabad instead of Bombay. He won over local industrialists led by Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and Gujarat’s first chief minister, Jivraj Mehta, allotted the land. The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad came into being on 11 December 1961, and Sarabhai served as its honorary director from June 1962 until Ravi Matthai became the first full-time director in August 1965. PRL records that Sarabhai chaired the Atomic Energy Commission from 1966 to 1971.

The committee of 1962

ISRO’s history says the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics across the Pacific by the American satellite Syncom-3 showed Sarabhai what space technology could do for India. Its biography adds that after Sputnik he persuaded the government that a developing country needed a space programme.

The Indian National Committee for Space Research, INCOSPAR, was the result. On 20 September 2023 the Rajya Sabha’s official report recorded the member Jairam Ramesh reading out an office order dated 22 February 1962. It says the committee was set up on the recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet, to advise the government on exploring space and using it for peaceful purposes. Ramesh named Homi Bhabha, who chaired that advisory committee, and Sarabhai as the two men responsible. ISRO’s biography says Bhabha supported Sarabhai in setting up the first rocket launching station.

PRL says Sarabhai became INCOSPAR’s chairman in 1962; ISRO’s list of former chairmen dates his term from 1963.

A church, a seaside village and an American rocket

Thumba, a coastal village at Thiruvananthapuram, was chosen because it lies close to the geomagnetic equator. Above that line flows the equatorial electrojet, a narrow belt of moving electrons. VSSC, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, explains that it flows too high for instrumented balloons and too low for satellites, so rockets were the only way to measure it. The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station was set up in 1962 under United Nations sponsorship.

In the beginning, VSSC’s history says, the ancient St. Mary’s Magdalene Church served as the office and laboratories, the local people having given it up for science. The Bishop’s House, part of the church, was once the station director’s office.

On 14 January 1963 NASA announced a memorandum of understanding with India’s Department of Atomic Energy. NASA’s chronology says it would supply nine Nike-Apache rockets for electrojet experiments, plus ground equipment on loan and training in the United States for the Indian crew handling telemetry and launches. India would provide the site, the staff and the supporting observations. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, later India’s president, was among the engineers Sarabhai picked for NASA training, according to a NASA history newsletter.

The first launch came on 21 November 1963. NASA’s chronology records that the Nike-Apache reached 106 miles (about 170 km) and was the first of four sodium-vapour experiments to find the speed and direction of winds in the upper atmosphere. It calls the flight the result of coordinated work by France, India and the United States.

One record does not fit. ISRO’s sounding-rocket page says the first rockets were imported two-stage vehicles from Russia (the M-100) and France (the Centaure), and does not name the Nike-Apache. VSSC’s history and NASA’s chronology both name the Nike-Apache for the 1963 flight.

Why a poor country should go to space

ISRO was formed on 15 August 1969 and took over from INCOSPAR with a wider brief, ISRO’s profile page says. In July 1972, after his death, the Thumba station, the Space Science and Technology Centre and other units were brought under a new Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, VSSC’s history says.

ISRO’s biography and VSSC both reproduce a passage in which Sarabhai answers critics of space spending, without giving its date or occasion. “We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets”, it reads, and the list in that sentence ends with crewed spaceflight. India, he said, had to be “second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society”.

In a 16 October 1966 All India Radio talk, quoted in a 2025 history of his public image, he put it more briefly: “We do not expect to send a man to the moon”. The historian Haitian Ma writes that this talk introduced his word “leapfrogging”, the idea that space work should help developing countries jump ahead. The missions that later made ISRO known for low cost are in the piece on its frugal engineering.

Television for villages

Sarabhai’s dialogue with NASA in 1966 led to the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, ISRO’s biography says. SITE ran from July 1975 to July 1976, after his death, using the American ATS-6 satellite. ISRO’s history page says it reached 2,400 villages in six states, trained 50,000 primary-school science teachers in a year, and was hailed as “the largest sociological experiment in the world”. NASA’s history newsletter says some people, Arthur C. Clarke among them, called it the greatest communications experiment in history.

What historians dispute

Amrita Shah’s biography, in its publisher’s description, says Sarabhai strongly resisted India’s move towards a nuclear explosion in the late 1960s, which put him at odds with powerful lobbies and fellow technologists. Ma’s article, which discusses Shah’s work, reports how officials of the time saw his position. It says his obliqueness on atomic weapons did not win applause from within the Indian leadership, and that The Times of India called his 1970 ten-year plan for atomic energy and space “indiscreet if not altogether objectionable”. Homi Sethna, who replaced him at the Atomic Energy Commission in 1972, is quoted there saying “He was a Gandhian, believed in peace at all costs.” Ma calls it open to debate whether Sarabhai himself accepted any dual use of his peaceful message.

Ma adds that the historian Asif Siddiqi argues Sarabhai’s development thinking leaned on Western models of modernity and did less for the rural population than it did to express his own standing in new India. Ma also argues that his public image as the founder was built mostly after his death.

Death in 1971, and his name on a centre, a crater and a lander

Sarabhai died on 30 December 1971 at Kovalam near Thiruvananthapuram, ISRO’s biography says. He was 52. Ma reports cardiac arrest.

The space centre in Thiruvananthapuram is named for him, and in 1974 the International Astronomical Union decided that a crater in the Sea of Serenity would be known as the Sarabhai crater. ISRO says he started the project that produced Aryabhata, put into orbit in 1975 from a Russian launch site; the Aryabhata piece has the build and the launch.

ISRO named the Chandrayaan-2 lander Vikram after him. It lost contact on 7 September 2019, about 2 km above the surface; Chandrayaan-3’s lander carried the name down on 23 August 2023. On 14 August 2020 the Press Information Bureau reported that the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter had imaged the Sarabhai crater, which ISRO’s figures put at about 1.7 km deep from its raised rim.