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Rohini-1
India joins the orbital-launch club
July 18, 1980ISRO
R.N. Mukherjee, CC BY-SA 4.0
The world that day
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Known worlds beyond the Sun
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.
By the numbers
- Launch
- 18 Jul 1980, Sriharikota Range (SHAR)
- Satellite mass
- 35 kg, spin-stabilised
- Orbit
- 305 × 919 km, 44.7° inclination
- Rocket
- SLV-3: 22 m tall, 17 tonnes, four solid stages
- Satellite power
- 16 W
- Orbital life
- ~20 months
Why it mattered
Rohini-1 marked the moment India became a complete space power, able to design, build and launch satellites without depending on any other nation. Achieved on a famously small budget with all-solid propulsion, the SLV-3 success validated ISRO's philosophy of frugal, incremental engineering and seeded the technology and the people, most famously A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, behind everything that followed: the PSLV workhorse, the Chandrayaan lunar missions, the Mangalyaan Mars orbiter and India's emergence as one of the most cost-effective launch providers in the world. It turned a developing nation's space programme from aspiration into demonstrated capability.
- The first SLV-3 attempt on 10 August 1979 ended with the vehicle falling into the Bay of Bengal after a second-stage failure; ISRO's official history diplomatically calls it 'partially successful'.
- The project director, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, went on to become the 11th President of India in 2002, earning the nickname 'Missile Man of India' along the way.
- Rohini RS-1's primary job was to grade its own rocket: it telemetered the SLV-3 fourth stage's performance to ground stations during the climb to orbit.
- ISRO's own histories call India the sixth member of the space-faring club, while other counts say seventh, depending on whether Britain's single-success, swiftly cancelled Black Arrow programme is included.
- India had operated a satellite since Aryabhata in 1975, but that one flew on a Soviet rocket; Rohini-1 was the first satellite launched from Indian soil on an Indian vehicle.
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