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New Book – Atlas of Space Rocket Launch Sites

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ISBN 978-3-86922-758-0
Size 240 x 300 mm
272 pages
500 images
Index
Glossary
Hardcover

** Description and look-inside below **

Available from: dom-publishers.com, www.amazon.com, www.freytagberndt.com, www.mondadoristore.it, www.lehmanns.de and www.abebooks.co.uk – a variety of suppliers at many lower prices.

Learn more from podcasts: New Space India, The Spaceshow and Aviation-Xtended

Book Reviews: www.wallpaper.com, www.raumfahrer.net, flugundzeit.blog, www.ivorypress.com and collectspace.com

To purchase signed copies directly from the authors contact Brian Harvey or Gurbir Singh

The book describes primary launch sites around the world including some that are historically significant but no longer operating (e.g Peenamunde) as well as the new kids on the block (e.g Kodiak).

The book is edited by Paul Meuser who has written the foreword and sourced most of the 500 or so majestic photos of launch sites and their environments. The majority of the text is authored by Dublin-based author Brian Harvey. A prodigious writer who has been writing on space programs of numerous countries since the 1970s. Katrin Soschinski designed stunning maps, the foundation of any atlas.

Copy of the back text page and a few sample pages from the book in the slide show below. These sample pages can be downloaded here albeit the quality is way inferior to the original.

Back page text

The machines that orbit our planet live in a void environment–
however, space travel itself does not exist in a vacuum. Traveling
to space is an immense effort of humans and machines, taking
not just ‘a small step for a man’ but leaving a huge carbon
footprint in the process. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift
in which private companies and leadership figures in the form of
Billionaires are re-popularizing space travel to an extent not seen
since the space race of the USSR and USA. Space exists isolated
from the place that births its mechanical and a few select human
inhabitants. Thus we tend to forget that every single thing that
exits our atmosphere takes with it more than just its own weight
of materials when it departs our fragile blue marble.

This book offers a unique look at the physical footprints of earth’s
launch sites. With most places hidden away in jungles, deserts, or
amidst the Central Asian steppes, these places exist for the most
part out of the eye of the general public. With satellites facilitating
our modern society and a modern space age ever-present in today’s
news cycle, it is now more important than ever to think about the
imprint these undertakings leave on earth. To begin to answer
the new socio-economic questions raised by our rapid expansion
into the void, we need to look no further than follow the cracks in
the concrete of our planetary launch sites. The rusty train tracks
leading to the pad break the pristine and sterile looks of space, and
reopen our eyes to the realities of space exploration.

Birth of the Indian Space Research Organisation

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This article was first published in the May 2022 edition of the British Interplanetary Society publication – Space Chronicles.

Three weeks after its extraordinarily ambitious mission, the crew of Apollo 11 splashed down in the North Pacific, and the Indian Space research Organisation (ISRO) came into being on 15 August 1969. At that time, it was still operating under the Department of Atomic Energy, where its predecessor, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), was founded in 1962. In the same year that the Apollo programme in the USA ended, India established the Department of Space in 1972 and brought ISRO under its management. This is the ISRO that has designed, built, launched and operates the 50-plus spacecraft of the 3500 operating in space today.

Today, its space assets provide services to its security forces, but it did not start that way. India’s space programme is probably the only national space programme that began with plans only for economic and societal development. Space programmes in the USA, USSR, China and elsewhere arose to serve a national security imperative. ISRO has met many of its original objectives for more than half a century. India’s assets in space provide services for communication, television, navigation and Earth observation. For scientific research, India has Astrosat, a space telescope in Earth orbit, Chandrayaan-2 in lunar orbit and since 2014, a spacecraft in Martian orbit. Some of India’s spacecraft provide services for the international community, including remote sensing, search & rescue and navigation for civil aviation.

One objective explicitly ruled out by its first charismatic chairman, Vikram Sarabhai, in 1969 was a human spaceflight. In 2018, India’s Prime Minister announced a new goal. Called Gaganyaan, its task is to place an Indian crew in low Earth orbit using an Indian launch vehicle launched from Indian soil by 2022. A variety of issues, especially the global pandemic, have ensured that the timeline will not be met, but the programme remains active. In January 2022, S. Somanath was appointed as Chairman. As Russia’s space activities diminish, opportunities will arise for others, and India is well placed to exploit them.  

ISRO will ramp up activities that will include the launch of OneWeb’s satellites, the inaugural flight of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, the second test flight of its reusable space plane, the third mission to the moon complete with a lander and a rover and a launch abort test for its Gaganyaan programme. I expect ISRO to make a significant announcement on 15th August 2022.

ISRO under lockdown

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Free online webinar from the British Interplanetary Society. 18:00 BST Friday 18th June 2021

Mission Control Centre

How has the Indian Space Program fared through the Covid-19 lockdown? In this hour long webinar including Q&A, I will offer a personal and tentative view of how India’s space activity has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the webinar I will look at how ISRO:

  • has supported the Covid-19 national medical emergency
  • space missions have impacted operationally
  • strategic plans have been delayed by the pandemic
  • especially the impact on the ambitious human spaceflight program – Gaganyaan

The webinar is free but you need to register here https://www.crowdcast.io/e/isro-under-lock-down- . It will be recorded and links to the recording will be available to all who register.

I recorded an interview with two senior ISRO representatives during IAC2019 in Washington. It is a fairly good indicator of ISRO’s plans for some of its key missions then (October 2019) prior to the the Covid-19 outbreak 6 months later.

India In Space

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Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle

There are around 3000 operational satellites around Earth right now. Just over 50 were designed, built and launched from India. Collectively they provide services for communication, television, navigation and Earth observation. In the pursuit of science, India has Astrosat, a space telescope in Earth orbit, Chandrayaan-2 in lunar orbit and India’s first mission to Mars, launched in 2013 is still providing data almost a decade on.

The Indian Space programme started 21st November 1963 with the launch of the first rocket into space from Indian soil. Since then, India has developed a comprehensive infrastructure to design, build, launch and operate spacecraft in orbit. Why did India choose such a seemingly impossible path for a developing nation just a decade and a half after independence?

There are three primary reasons. First, Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, had a very clear vision of India’s future forged on the anvil of science and technology. Second, a coincidence of timing – the space age arrived (with the launch of Sputnik in 1957) on his watch. India could have chosen the road for economic development that the West had traversed since the industrial revolution, or leap headlong into the 20th century and join the space race, a race in which the West was ahead but not by very much. Third, the commitment of a few accomplished scientists and intellectually gifted who had the commitment and potential to realise Nehru’s bold ambitions of an India with a vibrant, flourishing first world economy.

India built on science and technology

Jawaharlal Nehru

Despite his public adherence to the rituals and tradition of the faith that Nehru was born into, he considered himself more a Humanist than a Hindu. In his will he declared he did not want “any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death”. He embedded his vision of a forward-looking, science based future of India in the constitution. In Article 51A of the Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950, Nehru codified the central role of science, requiring that every citizen of India shall “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”.

The tradition of scientific investigation was well established in India long before the British arrived. During the three hundred years of British occupation, science conducted in India was the science that only benefited Britain. Despite these restrictions, the practice of science by Indians in India, during the colonial period, made some progress. 

Pioneers in Science

CV Raman Credit IISc

In 1894 JC Bose demonstrated the potential for radio communication by triggering an explosion of a small sample of gunpowder using radio waves.  In 1918, with Albert Einstein’s consent,  SN Bose published the first English translation of Albert Einstein’ s landmark work on General Relativity in Calcutta. Bose’s contribution is recognised in Physics today through the Bose-Einstein Condensate and the Boson.  

By the age of 42, CV Raman who had been educated and trained entirely in India, was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924, knighted by the British government in 1929 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

Origins of India’s Space Programme

In the summer of 1939, Homi Bhabha was visiting India prior to starting a new role at the University of Manchester, England. Then WW2 broke out.  Bhabha remained in India and developed the Atomic Energy Commission and in 1962 the Indian National Committee for Space Research and put Vikram Sarabhai in charge. Both Bhabha and Sarabhai came from successful business families known across India. They had also studied Physics in Cambridge. It was these connections in high society in India and amongst the international scientific community that Vikram Sarabhai exploited in growing the international collaboration that was critical for India to jut-start its space programme from a standing start.

International Collaboration

The Cold War forced many countries to choose between the democratic capital West and the Communist East. Despite the geopolitical bifurcation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Nehru ensured India took no side and remained Non-aligned. Sarabhai exploited this position further by attracting support for the nascent Indian space programme from USSR, France, USA and Britain. It was this step-by-step progress by which Sarabhai ensured Indian space scientists and engineers acquired hands-on experience working abroad, then built spacecraft and launch vehicles under license in India before gradually becoming fully self-reliant in space. 

The Indian Space Research Organisation was established in 1969. Today ISRO is recognised as a leading operator in space. Launched in 2007, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon was probably the  most challenging and successful mission to date. It took place in an age before social media and does not have the recognition it deserves. It carried instruments from USA, Japan, Sweden, Bulgaria and UK. It was this mission that made the first unequal detection of huge quantities of water near the lunar south pole. ISRO today has active collaboration projects with other leading space agencies. They include:

  • Roscosmos – India announced its human spaceflight mission Gaganyaan in 2018. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has been providing astronaut training for four Indian astronauts since 2019. The first crew carrying flight could take place in 2022.
  • NASA – NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR). A global Synthetic Aperture Radar mission to  study changes in glaciers and other hazards such as sea level rises. To be launched in 2022.
  • JAXA – Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX)A joint India-Japan mission to the South pole of the Moon. Japan to provide the launcher and rover and India would contribute the lunar lander (that will carry the rover to the surface). Currently scheduled for 2024.
  • India also plays a part on the global stage by participating in (a) United Nations Inter-Agency Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) with an objective to mitigate space debris generated by member agencies (b) comply with international law as a signatory to the 1967 The Outer Space Treaty, (c) provide transponders in GEO and LEO satellites to support  satellite-based international search and rescue (COSPAS-SARSAT) service (d) Voluntarily engage in data sharing with other space faring nations using the Multi-Object Tracking Radar based at Sriharikota

Space programmes around the world have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. ISRO has been impacted more than the most. Globally, 102 space launches were conducted in 2019, six of which were from India. This year, out of a global total of 114, India conducted two. During the space race of the 1960s between USA and USSR, an advance by one side triggered a response from the other. In 2019, China with  34 launches was ahead. In 2020 it was second with 39 launches. India will no doubt increase its launch cadence in 2021.

Coming Soon

Mars. Credit Isro

In addition to its recent success navigation constellation NAViC, science mission and progress with the Human Spaceflight programme, ISRO is actively pursuing additional objectives. In 2021 ISRO will conduct its first commercial launch of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle,  the second launch of the Reusable Launch Vehicle and another attempt to land on the Moon with Chandrayaan-3.

Before the middle of the current decade, ISRO will have launched  the first Indian astronauts to reach Earth orbit using an Indian launch vehicle from Indian soil,  a solar probe to observe the Sun – Aditya-L1, a second mission to Mars – Manglayaan-2 and the first mission to Venus – Shukrayaan-1.

First published in the March-April 2021 edition of Gyan Vitaranam