Chandrayaan-1

Today's day will be marked in gilded letters in India's history. Mission to moon is an important light-year asteroid in any country's space exploration programme and as Indians we all should be proud of this marvelous  feat achieved by our brilliant scientists.

 

If you visit the website of ISRO, www.isro.org, you can see a smiling photo of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai on its homepage. Dr. Sarabhai is called the father of India's space programme and aptly so. I am sure if he would be here today, he would be immensely  happy about this achievement. And so would be all scientists who chose to work for their motherland without thinking about any salaries or other perks that they could have got elsewhere.

 

I watched today's launch as a webcast, thanks to ISRO. It started at 5:20 PM Seattle time. Every minute, the invisible voice was saying, "mark minus 30 minutes", "mark minus 20 minutes", "mark minus 8 minutes", my heart was pounding with anxiety and hope side by side. Somewhere my inner voice was telling me that today's launch would be successful and sometimes you want things to succeed really badly. Today was that time. There were little hiccups in the network connection and it was reconnecting and re-buffering sometimes. But all is well that ends well.

 

Finally at the moment of launch, I saw a giant ball of fire and then slowly the trajectory of the rocket which will travel to the beloved "chandamama" of all Indian kids in a few days. After the launch, the invisible voice at ISRO was saying all the readings on the panels aloud and some of them were also visible on the screen.

 

One thought came to my mind while witnessing this historical moment. My country is going to progress, it is destined to progress no matter what. Whether to become a part of its future is a decision we all have to make, one day.