China’s space programme has always been and continues
to be military-driven. The story of how and why the military came to
play such a pivotal role in the country’s scientific and technological
development has just been unraveled in Evan Feigenbaum’s brilliant new
book China’s Techo-Warriors. Like its nuclear weapons programme as described
in the classic China Builds the Bomb by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai,
China’s space programme was established in the background of the Korean
War (1950-53), the Taiwan Straits crisis (1954-55) and of unfolding
events in Indochina in the early fifties. It received the initial impetus
from the USSR but this assistance ended by 1960. While Mao provided
the political leadership, it was Marshal Nie Rongzhen who is today acknowledged
as the father of the space programme. Others like Liu Bocheng and Peng
Dehuai also provided the military thrust.

It was actually Qian Xuesen who laid the scientific and technological
foundations of China’s space programme. Ironically, in the midst of
the McCarthy hysteria that had gripped the USA in the mid-1950s, Qian
was expelled from the USA in 1955 after staying and prospering in that
country for twenty years. Prior to that, he was highly distinguished
member of the faculty of the prestigious California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) at Pasadena where he was a co-founder of the famous Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. Qian who was a rocket specialist with several theoretical
contributions still standing to his name, had also served in the US
army. Other key scientific figures in the early years included Yang
Jiachi who had studied at Harvard University, Ren Xinmin who had studied
at the University of Michigan, Wang Daheng who was England-educated
and Chen Fangyun who had worked in England in the late 1940s. “Purely”
local products who played a crucial role in establishing the space programme
included Huang Weilu and Li Xu’e.

Cambridge-educated Vikram Sarabhai provided the original vision to India’s
space programme in the late 1960s. But he died prematurely in 1971.
Thereafter, Satish Dhawan imbued with the same vision gave shape to
Sarabhai’s legacy and took the space programme to new heights of technological
achievements never forgetting Sarabhai’s fundamental objective-space
for developmental applications like telecommunications, broadcasting,
meteorology and resource management. Indira Gandhi who could very easily
have used the space programme for national “prestige” or for
political purposes agreed wholeheartedly with the Sarabhai-Dhawan focus
on the essentiality of creating not an Indian Space Research Organisation
but an Indian Space Research Organisation. The only “diversion”
for ISRO came in the mid-1980s with the joint Indo-Soviet enterprise
that put Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma into orbit. But fortunately that
only momentary and did not cost ISRO anything. It was Dhawan who kept
India’s space programme a wholly civilian enterprise, an enterprise
derived from and intimately linked to the social and economic needs
and requirements of the country. While other noted scientists and technologists
of his generation spent their time in political parikramas in New Delhi,
Dhawan never moved out of Bangalore, insulated ISRO from political and
bureaucratic interference and enhanced the institutional character and
strength of ISRO by the manner in which he conducted himself in retirement.

It is an interesting coincidence that like Qian, Satish Dhawan also
took his doctorate from Caltech in 1951. These two giants of their respective
countries must have known and interacted with each other in the small,
exclusive setting of Caltech. Their largely similar political beliefs
would have drawn them even closer together. Dhawan shunned the media
and hence he is not a household name. But he was indeed a most unusual
personality, having an undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics,
a masters in English literature, another undergraduate degree in mechanical
engineering, a post-graduate degree in aeronautical engineering and
a doctorate in aeronautical engineering and mathematics. He was, as
Roddam Narasimha put it in his obituary article that appeared in Current
Science, India’s first engineering scientist.

The fact that China’s space programme has been military-oriented has
undoubtedly given it a clear edge in launch vehicle technology. Incidentally,
China’s launch site is in the northwest Gansu province not very far
from Dunhuang at the edge of the Gobi Desert, a city that lay on a crucial
junction of the Silk Road and the site of the extraordinary Mogao caves
discovered just over a century ago that housed a fabulous collection
of Buddhist literature, paintings, sculptures, textiles and other priceless
relics. But in almost all scientific and engineering aspects of satellite
technology barring the military satellite area, India is clearly ahead
even though the Chinese have launched more satellites than India has
(around 50 as compared to 35).. It is generally not known that while
China’s space programme started a good decade and a half earlier than
India’s, India had very quickly narrowed the time gap. China launched
its first satellite in 1970 while India did so in 1975. The momentum
has been kept up. This Indian leadership in satellite technology is
acknowledged by the Chinese themselves. A whole slew of satellites are
scheduled to be put in orbit by India in the next few years. These cover
not just the traditional areas of communications, broadcasting, weather
forecasting and remote sensing but in other areas like education, distance
learning, disaster management and telemedicine as well.