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The day the Cosmonaut came to Manchester

By Gurbir Dated: April 28, 2023 Leave a Comment

This piece was first published in Manchester Histories blog on 12 April 2023


Gagarin and British PM McMillan
Yuri Gagarin with the Prime Minister for the second time on 13th July 1961 (Courtesy RIA Novosti)

On Wednesday, 12th April 1961, a bright and sunny spring morning, an air force pilot of the USSR launched into space using a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. On his first trip outside the USSR,  Yuri Gagarin, aged 27 went -around the world in just 90 minutes. He broke the world altitude and speed records. He was the first to experience the realm and sensation of being in space. Exactly three months later, he came to Manchester.

He arrived at Ringway airport at around 10am on Wednesday, 12th July and travelled first to the Headquarters of his hosts, the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers (AUFW) in Old Trafford. It was a sunny day but peppered with occasional sharp showers typical in July. Thousands lined his route from Ringway to Old Trafford.  Travelling in an open-top Bently, he received a true Mancunian welcome. He was soaked. In the small union HQ, he was made an honorary member of the AUFW and President Fred Hollingsworth presented him with a medal engraved with the words “Together, moulding a better future”. 

His second stop was Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, a unique place in Machester’s history of the industrial revolution. By now, the rain had stopped but puddles hinted at the recent downpour. Stanely Nelson recalled shaking Gagarin’s hand near the foundry. He recalled the working conditions most foundry workers endured saying, “it was like a vision of hell. Smoke, fire and tiny thin men silhouetted against the foundry fire. No one was fat; they were all thin like Lowry’s match stick men”. Of all his time in Britain, it was this time surrounded by working men and women amongst the dirt and grime of a working foundry that Gagarin would later say he felt most at home.

He arrived at Manchester Town Hall for a formal civic reception hosted by the Lord Mayor. Albert Square and all the surrounding office windows and doorways were crammed with people waiting to see the only man with the experience of Earth orbit. The dignitaries who got to shake his hand included Bernard Lovell from Jodrell Bank and the mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw. At the Town Hall, Gagarin, speaking in Russian, expressed his wishes for future space missions saying, ”I would like naturally like to fly to the Moon then perhaps to Mars and Venus and even further if my abilities make it possible”. By 16:30, he was at Ringway on his flight back to London, where he had arrived the day before and would stay until his return flight to Moscow on Saturday, 15th July. 

His spaceflight was packed with risk. He had left his wife a letter saying that should he not return, a real possibility, she should not remain alone. He experienced problems at launch and another during re-entry. The service module separation did not go to plan. The mission and his life came close to a catastrophic end. Ejecting from his spacecraft and landing separately by parachute, he returned to Earth as a real-life superhero. It was a supreme technological triumph, fulfilling humanity’s age-old dream of leaving Earth. It was achieved by a nation championing the virtues of communism in the midst of the Cold War. This was his first visit to the heart of the democratic West to demonstrate the prowess of the communist way of life.

To avoid highlighting the USA’s failure (its ally) to “be the first”, the UK government could not offer Gagarin a formal invitation. The remarkable response on his first day in London on 11th July, the public turned out in their thousands lining the streets in London and inundating Earls Court, the venue of the Soviet Trade Fair. Before the day was out, he had received an invitation from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan and the Queen. His initial two-or-three-day UK visit was extended to five.

Following the global coverage of his flight in April, AUFW President Fred Hollingsworth discovered that Gagarin had trained as a Foundry Worker. It was the invitation the AUFW made in May of 1961 that brought Gagarin to Manchester.  Gagarin met the Prime Minister at the Admiralty and the Queen in Buckingham Palace, along with other visits to the Air Ministry, Mansion House and the Royal Society at Burlington House. In April 1962, the first anniversary of his flight, Gagarin sent a message to the people of Manchester saying, “And the firm handshakes of my fellow workers in the moulding shop were dearer to me than many awards”. For the many who saw or met Gagarin recalled his charm, good looks and his persistent smile.

Gagarin’s visit coincided with the heightened risk of another world war. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the end of the ban on nuclear weapons testing, the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was probably aware of the rising geopolitical tensions more than most. While in Manchester and London, Gagarin repeated his message of peace. Despite his extraordinary achievement, the people of Manchester saw an ordinary man with humble roots. For most, he was probably the only individual from the USSR they would ever meet.

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Episode 77: Satellite tracking – the early days

By Gurbir Dated: July 13, 2018 Leave a Comment

Sven Grahn has been working in the space field in one way or another for over fifty years. Officially retired, he continues to work as a project leader of a student satellite at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

He is perhaps best known for his work in tracking satellites launched by the secretive Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s.In those pre-internet days, his work along with others helped to identify individual mission characteristics such as mission types, members of the crew, take off and landing times. He recorded over 1000 conversations from orbiting spacecraft as they flew over Sweden.

In this interview, he speaks about

  • The impact of the space race on his choice of career
  • His work on sounding rockets and meteorology in Sweden and beyond
  • Satellite tracking. What he tracked, heard and recorded using radio and tape recorders.
  • How he came to research and write about the  satellite tracking conducted at Jodrell  Bank radio telescope in England

As an 11-year-old, Sven had seen Sputnik in the sky over Sweden with his own eyes. I started by asking him how the onset of the space race had impacted his choice of career?

https://media.blubrry.com/astrotalkuk_podcast_feed/astrotalkuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Episode-77-Satellite-tracking-the-early-days.mp3

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Udupi Ramachandra Rao (1932-2017) Humanitarian and Space Scientist

By Gurbir Dated: July 24, 2017 Leave a Comment

Professor UR Rao. ISRO HQ on 26 August 2013

Whilst Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai are rightly honoured as visionary architects of the Indian Space Programme, building and operationalising it fell to others. Key among these was Professor UR Rao who lead the team to build India’s first satellite, Aryabhata. He did it in just over two years with a small young team of engineers with zero experience. A major landmark in ISRO’s history, Aryabhata was launched in 1975 by the Soviet Union.  Just five years later he was behind the next major milestone. On the back of a successful bid for a free launch on the then experimental European launcher Ariane, he drove the project to build India’s first 3-axis stabilised communication satellite, APPLE.  That was India’s first communication satellite to operate from Geostationary orbit.

He lead ISRO as the Chairman between 1984 and 1994 but never really retired. I had the good fortune of meeting him in 2013, 2014 and 2015 in his office in ISRO HQ Bangalore where he continued to contribute to numerous projects. He had started out as a cosmic ray scientist, encouraged in part by his meeting in the early 50s with the Nobel laureate Abdus Salam. He shared stories of working with Homi Bhabha,  Robert Millikan, James van Allen,  and Vikram Sarabhai under whom he had completed his PhD.   On his desk, Rao he had a signed copy of Arthur C Clarke’s seminal Paper on “Extraterrestrial Relays” that is widely seen to have introduced the concept of communication satellites. In 1975 India was experimenting with communication satellites to deliver education to rural villages in India (the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment). He told me how India offered, probably the first private satellite TV set to (the then Sri Lanka based) Clarke but India was forced to offer one to the president of Sri Lanka too.

After completing his PhD in India Rao first worked at MIT and then in Dallas, Texas building cosmic ray instruments for NASA’s Pioneer, Mariner and Explorer spacecraft. Rao with his colleagues was waiting to meet President Kennedy in Dallas University when he was assassinated on 22nd November 1963. In 1993, in an hour-long meeting with US vice president Al Gore, Rao challenged US sanctions and secured concessions without which the IRS-1C mission would not have been able to proceed as planned.

During his time has ISRO chairman, he was instrumental directing and operationalising the now highly successful PSLV. In the late 1980s,  he initiated the next launch vehicle programme, the GSLV. Rao had developed a particularly close relationship with senior scientists, engineers and academicians in the Soviet Union. It was this relationship that allowed him to negotiate the Cryogenic engine technology transfer deal with the USSR in 1990. The USSR did not last, neither did that deal but  Rao had set ISRO on the road to developing the GSLV and the cryogenic engine technology.

During my interactions with him, I found him to be generous with his time, modest and self-effacing.  He always gave credit to his teams rather than taking it as the leader. Not only had he collected a series of awards and achievements during his lifetime but he stands out as one individual who was sincerely liked and respected not just in India but the USSR/Russia and USA. Through his work with ISRO, he was fulfilling the vision of his mentor, Vikram Sarabhai to bring the benefits of space technology to the ordinary people of India. But as the considerable body of his published work demonstrates, his ambition was more global. He sought out international collaboration at every opportunity including during his numerous interactions at the UN. In the opening to the preface of his 1996 book, Space Technology for Sustainable Development, he says “The most significant human enterprise of our century is, undoubtedly, the development and application of a space technology, which has not only revolutionised the present but holds the best promise to shape our common future”. It is not an exaggeration to say that Rao believed in space technology as an essential endeavour for the future of the planet and human civilisation.

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Book Review – India’s Rise as a Space Power

By Gurbir Dated: December 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

Title: India’s Rise as a Space PowerIndias Rise as a Space Power
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, India Pvt Ltd
Author: U.R Rao
ISBN-10: 9382993487 ISBN-13: 978-9382993483

In the April of 1971, the USSR approached India and offered to launch an Indian satellite. Vikram Sarabhai asked UR Rao to develop and lead the program. In December 1971 Sarabhai died. Perhaps it was this sacred memory of his mentor, friend and boss that gave Rao the infinite drive to put an Indian built satellite in Earth orbit with remarkable haste.  Where Sarabhai had given India a space program, Rao gave India the confidence to design,  build and operate satellites.  This was the start of Rao’s fascinating career with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)  that culminated in his decade long tenure as ISROs’ chairman starting in 1984. In this book, Rao recalls his personal recollections whilst at the helm when ISRO started to build and launch science, communication and remote sensing satellites, initiate program for the GSLV 3 heavy launch vehicle and established Antrix, ISROs commercial arm.

The main thrust of the book documents Rao’s key contribution, specifically establishing India’s satellites program and developing  the ground based infrastructure to receive, process and disseminate the resulting data.   It also captures the collaborative, competitive and antagonistic environment of the Cold War that prevailed at the time.

The author shares some remarkable insights that given his central role, have an unquestionable authority.  For example, the Soviet Ambassador Pegov in May 1971 asserted that USSR would only launch India’s first satellite if it was heavier than the first satellite launched by the Chinese (p27).  India was not a just a passive receiver of help from the USSR but as professor Kovtunenko acknowledged India was of “immense value” (p47) to the Soviet space program too. The USSR launched the first three satellites (Aryabhata, Bhaskara 1 & 2) and EAS launched the 4th (Ariane Passenger PayLoad Experiment APPLE).  All were launched without charge. Drawing on his personal international contacts he provided the leadership and the inspiration to make it happen.

In chapter eleven Rao describes his own reservations in the value of accepting the Soviet’s offer to launch an Indian Astronaut. Indian Air Force’s Rakesh Sharma returned from his 8 days in space in April 1984 to huge public celebrations. But ISRO was not ready and could not build on that success at the time.

Most of the 21 chapters in the book deal with the potential of space technology to help mitigate poverty and elaborate on how far that potential has been realised.  Chapter 19 deals with one of the most fascinating episodes in ISRO’s history and Rao was at the centre of it at the time.  India had mastered rockets that used solid propellants and liquid propellants.  ISRO then embarked on a  program to acquire cryogenic engine technology (engines that use liquid Oxygen at -182C and Liquid Hydrogen at -253C) the most efficient rocket engines that exist. The very low operating temperature is a tough engineering challenge. This episode illuminates not only the political upheavals of the early 1990s but also the economics of national space programs.  India had negotiated a cryogenic technology transfer deal with the Soviets but soon after the breakup of the USSR, the USA flexing its muscle as the only superpower forced Russia to renege on the deal. Threatened by the commercial impact of India as a rising space power, USA falsely claimed that the Indo-Soviet technology transfer deal violated the Missile Technology Control Regime.

It is traditional for any book review to include aspects that were not up to scratch even if it ticks all the boxes. A key omission was an index. This is true for any non-fiction book but especially one that deals with key events, people and places. Most of the book uses clear articulate text for which no scientific background is required. However there are small section that are a little heavy e.g “12 C-band transponders provided a 10/12 functional redundancy” (p96). Rao after all is an accomplished cosmic ray scientist with a substantial track record in writing scientific papers.

The author uses the word “parallely” frequently throughout the book.  Initially it was a little repetitive but ultimately this one word conveys the central message that satellite development was not taking place in isolation but several elements of a national infrastructure steeped in science and technology were being harnessed simultaneously for a modern India as the 21st century approached.Sarabhai’s original vision was finally being realised.   

In what is one of the shortest chapters (Chapter 8) Rao describes the birth of the ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC).  Today ISAC is  where satellites are designed and built before going to Earth orbit or in to deep space. ISAC is a central component of Rao’s extensive legacy and this book authoritatively captures the details of how it came about. The book has an immense value for future historians. Not all previous ISRO chairmen have documented their experiences as Rao has done here.   It is a valuable source of fascinating information in India’s development, an example that future ISRO chairmen should be encouraged to follow.

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