On November 21, 1963, India launched its first sounding rocket, a Nike-Apache supplied by the United States, from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station near Thiruvananthapuram. The modest launch, organized by a young Vikram Sarabhai and a team that included A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, marked the origin of what would become the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO.
The launch site itself tells much of the story: Thumba was chosen for its location near the magnetic equator, ideal for upper atmosphere research, but it was also just a quiet fishing village with a church and a bishop's palace that the government had to negotiate to use as makeshift offices and laboratories. Scientists reportedly transported rocket parts to the site by bicycle and bullock cart, a detail that has become part of ISRO's founding lore.
Vikram Sarabhai, an physicist and industrial scion, had persuaded Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that a newly independent, poor nation could not afford to ignore space technology if it wanted to leapfrog into the modern era, particularly for communications and meteorology. A young engineer named A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who would later become President of India, was among the small team assembling the imported rocket that day.
The Nike-Apache rocket carried a sodium vapor payload and flew a brief sounding mission into the upper atmosphere before falling into the Arabian Sea. It was an unglamorous beginning, but it set in motion a program that, within four decades, would put India among the handful of nations capable of interplanetary missions, including Mars and the Moon.