Rohini-1 — India joins the orbital-launch club

On the morning of 18 July 1980, from the island of Sriharikota on India's eastern coast, a slender 22-metre rocket lifted off and climbed out over the Bay of Bengal. Eleven months earlier, the first SLV-3 had risen into that same sky and then tumbled into the sea when its second stage failed. This time every stage burned true. When the fourth stage fell silent, the 35-kilogram Rohini RS-1 satellite was circling the Earth, and India had joined the small group of nations able to build a satellite, build a rocket, and place one atop the other entirely with its own hands.

The Satellite Launch Vehicle SLV-3 was a study in doing much with little: four stages, all solid-fuelled, a total mass of just 17 tonnes, and a payload of about 40 kilograms to low Earth orbit. Rohini RS-1, the spin-stabilised satellite it carried, ran on a modest 16 watts of power, and its first task was to report on its own ride, telemetering the performance of the rocket's fourth stage down to ground stations as it climbed. It settled into a 305 by 919 kilometre orbit inclined at 44.7 degrees and remained aloft for some twenty months.

The project director who lived through both the failure and the triumph was a young engineer named A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. The 1979 loss had stung him deeply; the 1980 success made him a national figure, and twenty-two years later he became President of India. The country had owned a satellite since 1975, when Aryabhata flew on a Soviet rocket, but Rohini was the first to ride an Indian one. From SLV-3's solid stages ISRO built the ASLV, then the PSLV that became one of the world's most dependable workhorses, a lineage that now stretches to the Moon and Mars.