Dr Vikram Sarabhai

01Cosmic rays and PRL

Vikram was born into the Sarabhai family of textile industrialists in Ahmedabad and grew up in a house where Tagore, Gandhi and C. V. Raman were guests. He studied at Cambridge, came home when the Second World War began, and worked on cosmic rays under Raman at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. After taking his Cambridge doctorate he founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad on 11 November 1947, starting in a few rooms of a college. He also helped found the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association.

02From Thumba to ISRO

Sarabhai persuaded the government that a poor country needed satellites for weather, communication and teaching more than any rich one. He chose Thumba, a fishing village near Thiruvananthapuram on the magnetic equator, for a rocket range. On 21 November 1963 the first sounding rocket, an American Nike-Apache, rose from there, its parts carried to the launch pad on bicycles. In 1969 the Indian Space Research Organisation was formed, with Sarabhai at its head. He also chaired the Atomic Energy Commission after Homi Bhabha’s death. He died in his sleep at Kovalam on 30 December 1971, aged fifty-two. Bharat’s Moon lander of 2023 was named Vikram after him.