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COMMENT
Satish Dhawan — the gentle colossus

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P. V. Manoranjan Rao

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009 23:37 IST
UPDATED: SEPTEMBER 25, 2009 02:22 IST
The recent launch of Chandrayaan-1 has inspired many young people and given the nation

a sense of justifiable pride in the achievements of the Indian space programme. Amidst the
euphoria surrounding such glamorous events, let us recall the gentle colossus who made it

all possible — Professor Satish Dhawan. Though Vikram Sarabhai was the visionary, it was
Dhawan who lent substance to this vision and built the Indian Space Research

Organisation (ISRO) into the vibrant body that it is today.

One of the first and possibly the most important things that Dhawan did was to bring
Brahm Prakash from the Department of Atomic Energy to head the newly-formed Vikram

Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) at Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). At that time,
activities at VSSC were fragmented, with different groups working independently on a

variety of problems and projects — some of them even competing with each other. Brahm
Prakash restructured and welded these amorphous entities into a dynamic structure