And from then on, every few years, there would be a significant milestone that would make us all proud. And on 23 August, this year, when India became the fourth nation to land a spacecraft on the moon, the hearts of every Indian would swell with pride.

In the story of the people behind Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the country’s space agency, lies the answer to what makes it the pre-eminent ‘make-in-India’ success story, and arguably the nation’s most admired and impactful startup.

When engineers from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were busy making contributions to the American space programmes, Isro was being built by talented engineers from some of India’s relatively obscure colleges.

This is not a comment on the IITians’ lack of patriotism or anything of that sort but more about the depth of talent in the country and how the right kind of leadership and culture can bring the best out of anyone.

Isro’s constraints that made it impossible for the organization to match the salaries of multinationals in India or tech companies in the US, forced it to pick people who had hunger in the belly and a passion for technology. In the end, this strategy worked very well as results show.

The founder

Ambalal Sarabhai was a successful and affluent Gujarati businessman who owned many textile mills and, like some of the other industrialists of his time, was also an ardent supporter of the freedom movement. It was perhaps his loss, and the nation’s gain, that his son Vikram Sarabhai showed more interest in physics than in running his father’s business.

The junior Sarabhai was the epitome of a visionary and institution builder, and at the young age of 28, when most people are still struggling to figure out what they want to do with their lives, he set up the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad. PRL would be the nursery that would in later years provide talent to many of the country’s leading science and technology missions.

Like in the case of any great startup, Isro’s journey, too, began as an idea in someone’s mind.

Sarabhai’s vision, clarity of thought and charisma were instrumental in putting together the early team of extremely smart, young and motivated individuals, some of whom gave up coveted jobs in established research institutions to be part of what was at that time a risky venture with little or no chance for success.

Many of the early recruits like R. Aravamudan, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Eswar Das and HGS Murthy would go on to occupy pivotal roles in Isro and steer its journey in the years and decades ahead. The ability to attract and retain some of the best people at every stage in its journey would be the organization’s trump card.

But no startup can scale entirely on the strength of its early recruits. At some point in its journey, bringing in fresh talent laterally to bridge some of the gaps is essential, and the most notable of these would be Satish Dhawan and UR Rao, both of who would go on to become the chairmen of the organization.

One of the problems with high growth startups is the friction and mistrust between the early recruits and the subsequent lateral hires, who come in at a relatively senior level, and this is often the undoing of startups that otherwise have everything going for them. Isro never had this problem. The culture of meritocracy, non-hierarchical mindset, transparency and freedom to innovate, (and fail), was institutionalized at a very early stage.

And the magic this created in terms of succession and continuity was instrumental in sustaining the excellence needed to pursue such long-term ambitious technology missions.

Sarabhai always had a 20-year blueprint. He was dreaming of launching geostationary satellites much before India had the rocketry to put a 30-kilo satellite into near-earth orbit and creating liquid-fuel propellant capability to power the next generation of rockets.

He backed his dreams with the foresight and action that would create technology and human capital capabilities needed for achieving these dreams in the future. India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) would go on to become the most admired rocket in its category and would be the preferred launch vehicle of many countries for their remote sensing satellites.

In December 1971, a few weeks after the Bangladesh war, Sarabhai died, at the age of 52. He had dreamt and hustled to make Isro’s zero-to-one journey a spectacular success. In startup lingo, it had achieved a perfect product-market fit and was now ready to scale. And in the fitness of things, Sarabhai died at Halcyon Castle in Thiruvananthapuram, his beloved place where he had set up India’s first rocket launching centre.

Isro now needed a leader who could bring order to the chaos that was such an essential aspect of its early phase. Satish Dhawan, who was then at Caltech, was the perfect leader for the next phase of Isro’s journey. Dhawan brought the much-needed method to the madness and took execution up by a few notches through a combination of focus, prioritization, and effective review mechanisms.

Team comes first

One of the defining elements of Isro’s culture was that when something went wrong, the senior leadership would look in the mirror to ask what could have been done better.

On 10 August 1979, when the nation watched with bated breath, India’s first indigenously developed rocket SLV-3 crashed into the Bay of Bengal minutes after lift-off. Kalam was the project director and Dhawan the chairman. Kalam and team were disheartened, but Dhawan never once, even obliquely, attributed the failure to the team and was in the forefront to answer questions from a sceptical media that was quick to dub the SLV a “sea-loving vehicle”.

Nearly a year later, on 18 July 1980, in a second attempt, when the rocket successfully put the indigenous satellite Rohini into a near-earth orbit, Dhawan stepped back quietly into the shadows and allowed Kalam and team to bask in the glory.

The other incredibly exquisite element of the Isro culture has been the way failures were analysed and quickly fixed in the subsequent missions. The intention was never to fix blame, but to fix the problem. Extensive ground testing is no guarantee of success, and every failure was systematically analysed by a carefully constituted committee. In many of the failures, the team was able to pinpoint the cause accurately, and this was addressed in the subsequent launches.

For instance, the failure of the first launch of SLV-3 was attributed to a leakage of the control fluids and the failure of the first launch of PSLV was attributed to an arithmetical error in the onboard computer and the failure of two retro rockets to fire during the second stage separation.

However, in some cases, the real cause of failure could never be accurately pointed out, but this never resulted in paralysis, and the next launch was planned after incorporating recommendations and remedial measures covering several areas.

When Chandrayaan-3 touched down at the south pole of the moon, it was so heartening to watch S. Somanath step back—he put his team in front of the cameras on national television. Equally heartening was the ease with which he gave credit to his predecessors, especially those who had worked on the previous two Chandrayaan missions.

Make-in-India

When it comes to programmes of national importance, make-in-India does not necessarily mean starting from scratch and developing everything within the country. It is about a deep commitment to developing strategic capabilities that would never put the country at anyone’s mercy.

This reflected from day one of Isro’s 60-year journey. In 1962, the year India’s space mission was born (it was christened as Isro only in 1969), a crack team comprising of the best engineering minds from different streams (Aravamudan and Kalam, among others) were sent to NASA to learn about telemetry, tracking, and rocket technology. With the know-how they acquired, India’s first rocket launching centre at Thumba was established.

In the early 1970s, India was beginning to think of the PSLV, and building this rocket needed a mastery of liquid-fuel propulsion. Developing this from scratch would have taken a very long time, but by sheer serendipity, at that point of time, France needed some critical equipment for their Ariane programme (European civilian launch vehicles for space launch use), which could be manufactured at much lower cost in India.

In exchange, the French offered to transfer the liquid-fuel propulsion technology which was used in their Viking engines. Isro, under Dhawan, grabbed this opportunity, and used the Viking engine designs to perfect the Vikas engine, or Isro’s family of liquid-fuelled rocket engines.

While the Viking engine would run into trouble in later times, India’s Vikas engine would power the PSLV, and the reliability and consistency of performance of this rocket configuration would be the single most important indicator that India’s space programme had truly come of age. The project director for the first couple of PSLV missions was the formidable Madhavan Nair, whose first job was with Isro. He would go on to become the organization’s chairman.

The biggest make-in-India challenge as well as success story of Isro was the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). The geopolitics of the times (the tumultuous decade of the 1990s) magnified the challenge multifold. Geostationary satellites need to be put at an orbital height of around 36,000km, which is 60 times the orbital heights of sun-synchronous satellites.

GSLV rockets would need cryogenic engines for the final stage and very few countries had this technology. The first offer to supply cryogenic engines was from the American firm General Dynamics. But the price point was astronomical and combined with America’s low credibility as a reliable partner back then, this discussion ended quickly.

However, all was not lost, and Russia, as an all-weather friend, agreed to help India develop cryogenic engines. A contract was signed with the Russian firm Glavkosmos. However, this was precisely the time when Russian influence on the world stage began shrinking rapidly and the US emerged as the sole superpower.

Decades of mistrust led the US to use every tool at its disposal, including the severely restrictive covenants of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), to put the brakes on this technology transfer. And as the GSLV project remained in suspended animation, PSLV had its moments of glory, launching satellites from countries all over the world.

Finally, a compromise was reached and Glavkosmos agreed to sell a few cryogenic engines. Engines were not enough and Isro had to develop the controls that would be compatible with these engines. Simultaneously, Isro decided to accelerate the indigenous development of cryogenic technologies. Both the current and the last chairman, Somanath and K.Sivan, would play crucial roles in the GSLV missions.

The first GSLV flight was aborted during the countdown, but the fault was quickly traced to a piece of lead blocking one of the pipelines. In less than a month, a second attempt was made, and this time it was a spectacular success.

R.V. Perumal was the project director and Madhavan Nair was by then the director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC).

The GSLV programme was continuously improvised and indigenized. Finally, in 2014, in its seventh mission, when the indigenous GSLV-D5 successfully launched GSAT-14 into a geosynchronous orbit, it was truly symbolic of India’s entry into the big boys club, which the US had worked hard to keep India away from.

In summary

Isro benefited immensely from having a visionary founder whose invisible hand was there as a guiding force decades after his death. The culture he had helped create was reinforced by every leader who followed in his footsteps. It was evident that Isro was never dependent on any one individual.

When Satish Dhawan retired after nearly 12 years at the helm, his protégé, U.R. Rao, stepped into his shoes. Every new leader at the organization was as illustrious as his predecessor. And in years to come, Isro would become a workplace that would be inclusive in all respects. Women scientists, researchers and programme heads would lead many of its most complex missions.

T.N. Hari is an author and co-founder of Artha School of Entrepreneurship.