ISRO — the one that started on a bicycle
Sixty years from rocket parts on bikes in a Kerala fishing village to the first landing at the lunar south pole — and the fastest, cheapest way there. Mars orbit on a first attempt for the price of a Hollywood film. A rover that hopped. A crewed station on the way.
Bicycles under the coconut trees
In 1962 the founding committee of what would become ISRO set up in an old fishing-village church in Thumba, on the Kerala coast, chosen because it sat directly on Earth's magnetic equator. Rocket parts moved to the launch pad on bicycles. Sounding rockets went up under coconut trees.
Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, physicist, INCOSPAR chairman, and the intellectual architect of Indian spaceflight, told anyone who would listen that a developing country's space programme was not a luxury — it was infrastructure for the country's real problems. Weather. Telecoms. Broadcasting into villages with no electricity. If India was going to do it at all, it had to be world-class.
On 21 November 1963 India's first sounding rocket lifted off from Thumba. On 15 August 1969 ISRO was formally constituted. On 19 April 1975 India's first satellite, Aryabhata, went up on a Soviet Kosmos-3M. On 18 July 1980 — after one honest failure the year before — India's own SLV-3 put the Rohini satellite into orbit, and the country joined the seven others that could reach space on their own hardware.
"Space is not a luxury for a developing nation. It is the tool that solves the country's real problems."
The workhorse, and the first Indian in space
Through the 1980s and 1990s ISRO built the two things every space programme actually needs: a reliable ride and a useful payload. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) — solid + liquid stages, four-stage architecture, first flight 1993 — became one of the most dependable launchers on Earth. Over 50 consecutive successes. Sun-synchronous Earth observation, interplanetary probes, and dozens of commercial rideshares for other countries — all rode PSLV.
The INSAT geostationary series (from 1983) rebuilt Indian telecoms, television, and weather forecasting from the ground up. The IRS remote-sensing series (from 1988) grew into the world's largest civilian Earth-observation constellation. On 2 April 1984 Group Captain Rakesh Sharma flew Soyuz T-11 to Salyut 7 — the first Indian citizen in space, three decades before ISRO would be building its own capsule.
The bigger cryogenic-upper-stage launcher, the GSLV, first flew in 2001. In 2007 ISRO recovered the SRE-1 capsule after twelve days in orbit — a re-entry demonstration that quietly laid the thermal-protection foundation for everything that would come after.
Water on the Moon
On 22 October 2008 a PSLV-XL lifted Chandrayaan-1 — India's first Moon mission — from Sriharikota. It carried instruments from ISRO, NASA, ESA, and Bulgaria, and one small impactor called the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) that would be deliberately crashed into the lunar surface near Shackleton crater.
NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on board Chandrayaan-1 detected the signature of hydroxyl and water molecules in the lunar regolith at high latitudes — not trapped inside a crater, but bound to the soil itself across the Moon's daylit surface. Along with corroborating data from Cassini and Deep Impact, this confirmed water on the Moon and rewrote the textbooks. Every lunar-south-pole mission being planned today — Artemis, Chang'e 7, Chandrayaan-4, LUPEX — traces back to what that instrument saw.
Mars on the first try, for $73M
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Before ISRO, no space agency had successfully placed a spacecraft in Mars orbit on its first attempt. The Americans took multiple tries. The Soviets took many more and never really got there. The Europeans had partial success. The Japanese lost their first Mars probe.
ISRO launched the Mars Orbiter Mission — Mangalyaan — aboard PSLV-C25 on 5 November 2013. On 24 September 2014, on the first attempt, Mangalyaan entered Martian orbit. It was designed to last six months. It kept working for over seven years, until April 2022.
The total mission budget was approximately ₹450 crore — about US$73 million. Less than the production budget of the film Gravity. Less than NASA had spent on its own Mars atmospheric-loss orbiter, MAVEN, which arrived at Mars two days ahead of Mangalyaan.
"Cheaper than a Hollywood film. First try. Seven years on station."
Where nobody had gone
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Chandrayaan-2, launched in July 2019, tried to land near the lunar south pole and lost its Vikram lander in the final descent because of a software fault. The orbiter, however, made it into lunar orbit and is still running today — its dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar has been mapping subsurface ice deposits in the polar regions ever since.
Four years later, on 14 July 2023, an LVM3-M4 launched Chandrayaan-3 from Sriharikota. On 23 August 2023, its Vikram lander performed a flawless soft landing at what ISRO named Shiv Shakti Point, near the lunar south pole. India became the fourth nation to soft-land on the Moon — and the first, of any nation, to do so at the rugged high southern latitudes. The Pragyan rover rolled out and ran the first-ever in-situ measurements of the topmost fluffy layer of lunar soil.
Before powering down at the two-week lunar night, Vikram performed a hop experiment: it fired its engines, lifted off the surface, translated a short distance horizontally, and set itself down again. A rehearsal for lunar-orbit ascent — for a future sample return, and for a future crewed landing.
"Fourth to land. First to the south pole. Then it hopped."
The pivot to crewed
The last two years have compressed a decade of qualification work. On 2 September 2023 — nine days after the Chandrayaan-3 landing — a PSLV-XL lifted Aditya-L1, India's first dedicated solar observatory. It reached its halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometres out, in January 2024, and now watches the Sun continuously without ever being eclipsed.
On 30 December 2024, PSLV-C60 launched the SPADEX pair — two small satellites whose whole purpose was to prove ISRO could dock them autonomously in orbit. On 16 January 2025, they did. Then undocked. Then re-docked, and demonstrated power transfer. Autonomous space docking is the technology that unlocks two of the biggest missions on ISRO's board — Chandrayaan-4's dual-launch sample return, and the Bharatiya Antariksh Station.
In June 2025, Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot on Axiom Mission 4, on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, to the International Space Station. Forty-one years after Rakesh Sharma. Two years before Shukla is scheduled to command Gaganyaan-4 — India's first independent crewed spaceflight.
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"Solar observatory at L1. Autonomous docking. A returning astronaut. The next decade begins."
The next decade
Gaganyaan-1 — an uncrewed orbital demonstrator — is scheduled for the second half of 2026, followed by two more uncrewed flights carrying the Vyommitra humanoid robot. The first crewed Gaganyaan flight is targeted no earlier than the second quarter of 2027, on a human-rated HLVM3, with Shubhanshu Shukla as commander. Behind Gaganyaan sit two flagships: Chandrayaan-4 around 2028 — a dual-LVM3, five-module lunar south-pole sample return targeting Mons Mouton — and the first core module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station around 2028, with full deployment by 2035 as a 52-tonne, three-crew Indian station in LEO. A Venus orbiter was formally approved in September 2024. A crewed lunar landing is on the calendar for 2040.
"Started on a bicycle. Ends the decade with a station in orbit."