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Located about 80km from Chennai on India's east coast, Satish Dhawan Space centre is used by ISRO to launch all of its satellites including those to the Moon and Mars. Also known as Sriharikota, it was established during the late 1960s but today it has a vehicle assembly building, two launch pads and a state of the art mission control centre

The Indian Space Program was initiated by a brilliant nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha who pretty much immediately handed over the space program to Vikram Sarabhai. Bhabha himself pursued the goal of bringing institutionalised fundamental research to India. At the time he saw that as essential for the new emerging independent India.

India's space program is now over half a century old. During this time its Infrastructure has evolved. This episode looks at the current communication capabilities used to support space vehicles during launch, in Earth orbit or on a interplanetary missions. ISRO has an extensive network of ground stations on the Indian mainland, off-shore and neighbouring countries (Mauritius and Fiji) and collaborates with Norway, Russia, USA and European countries for mission specific needs. ISRO also has ship borne resources it deploys to meet individual mission profiles.   ISRO's flagship deep space antenna is the 32m fully steerable dish at Byalalu close to Bangalore. It was established for the 2008 Moon mission and has been the primary resource for communicating with its Mars Orbiter Mission. Byalalu is also the central site for India's Regional Navigation Satellite System IRNSS due to come in to full operation in 2016. This conversation was recorded in March 2014 with the then director of the ISRO Satellite Centre

Interview recorded at ISRO's satellite Centre in Bangalore with Mars Orbiter Mission program director Dr Mylswamy Annadurai. This interview was recorded on 26th March 2014 after MOM was launched but before it arrived at Mars.

Contribution of Stephen H Smith to development of rocketry and the Anglo Indian community in India of which he is a member.

This episode is a preview of some of the space related exhibits in Europe's largest aerospace museum - Speyer Technik Museum, in Germany. If you ever go and the following may entice you to do so,  four space exhibits to look out for include the following: Soyuz TM19 - The landing capsule Soyuz TM-19 was used by the German astronaut Ulf Merbold to return to Earth on 4th November 1994 following his launch in Soyuz TM-20 on 3rd October 1994. Buran - The Soviet Space shuttle Buran was a the Soviet response to the American Space Shuttle. Two complete working vehicles were made.  The Buran was unmanned and, although reusable, was never actually reused. One made a single flight to space and was later destroyed when the hangar housing it collapsed. The other made 25 test flights also unmanned but only in Earth atmosphere.  Following an unexpected find in the Persian Gulf by German journalists, it was brought to Speyer in 2008. Bor-5 - To assist the Soviets' design of the Buran they built and flew BOR-5 - a  1:8 sc

November 21st 2013 was the 50th anniversary of a rocket launched from India in to space. The launch itself was an all Indian affair but with lots of international support. The rocket was American, carried a French Sodium Vapour payload with assisted by a computer and a helicopter from the Soviet Union. From this meagre beginning, India has become a key player not only  in building and launching rockets  but also designing , building and deploying satellites. This episode was recorded on the site of that first launch. Then  known as the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station and is today known as the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.  Sundaram Ramakrishnan, the current director of the  Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) talks about his 4 decade long career with the Indian Space Research Organisation. He has has played a central role throughout the development of India's most reliable launcher - the  Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). http://youtu.be/o8C0TvUXvOo

Prof. UR Rao The Indian Space Research Organisation formally came in to being in 1972. By then, India had been developing its space program for almost a decade. The first launch to space from Indian soil was a two stage Nike-Apache rocket supplied by USA with a  sodium  payload from France. The rocket delivered a vertical trail of sodium vapour in space above the twilight sky of the south eastern coast of Kerala on 21st November 1963. In this episode, professor UR Rao talks about his rich and diverse career. Professor Rao completed his Phd under Dr Vikram Sarabhai, then went on to work for NASA at MIT and in Texas exploring the Solar System with instruments on NASA's Pioneer and Explorer spacecraft. He returned to India at Sarabhai's request and after heading up the Physical Research Laboratory, in 1984 became the chairman of the Indian Space Research organisation. He served in that role until 1994. During his 81 years, he has participated in many significant areas in space and science exploration.  Severa

  BAS Coorg Start Party 27 Mar 2011 Photo credit- BAS Another episode in the current series about space and India. Bangalore Astronomical Society (BAS) is probably the most industrious astronomical societies in India. Founded in 2006, it has nearly 200 paid up members based in and around Bangalore but a huge number of national and international followers online. In this episode, BAS president Naveen Nanjundappa, describes BAS's origins, achievements and future goals. I have added a few links below - if you have others worth sharing please submit via a comment. Google Group is the primary online platform but BAS has a presence on Events Announcement Group, Orkut Community, Facebook Group and of course Twitter. http://youtu.be/O5uWpZ5U5rE

With a population of 1.2 billion people, India has just one national with first hand experience of spaceflight. Rakesh Sharma, a now retired Indian Air Force wing commander in 1984 spent eight days in space aboard the Soviet space station Salyut 7. This account of his spaceflight was recorded at this home in the Nilgris region of India in August 2013. MP3 audio below and Youtube video below that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up_ANSNTB-U

Amrita Shah Vikram Sarabhai  is unanimously accepted across India as the "father" of its space program. Not really known well outside India, he died suddenly and prematurely at age of 52 in 1971. He had studied cosmic ray physics and gained his PHD from Cambridge in 1947 the same year India became an independent nation.  He spent the rest of his life implementing a vision that the prosperity of India and all of its people lay in science. The scientific institutions he built still play key role in India today. Convincing the Indian population that they had the intellectual capacity to rebuild India with their own hands is perhaps his lasting legacy. The most scholarly biography on his eventful life is Vikram Sarabhai - A life by Amrita Shah. A review of the book is available here. This episode is a recording with Amrita Shah conducted fittingly at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where Vikram Sarabhai studied physics under C V Raman who in 1930 had won the Nobel Prize for physics. http://yout

Jim reavis A short interview with Jim Revis recorded in London on 24th April during InfoSec 2013. In this interview Jim talks about the evolving definition of of Cloud Computing, the CSA's Star Registry, CSA's Cloud Computing Security Knowledge certification and his take on how cloud Computing has been and is evolving. During the interview, Jim refers to a collaborative program between the CSA and (ISC)2 to create a new  professional certification in Cloud Security. More details here. For my earlier post on CCSK with a downloadable full text pdf - see here    

Reg Turnill with Wernher von Braun 1977 Like so many in the “space community” I was saddened to hear of the passing of Reg Turnill. He was  the BBC’s aerospace correspondent but is  best known  for covering the American Space program  throughout the 60s and 70s that he documents so well in his book Moonlandings: An eye witness account. He was the BBC’s representative in Moscow at Gagarin’s post flight press conference and told me in episode 41 of his experience when I went to meet him in January 2011. Reg captures the ambiguity of the brilliant Wernher von Braun who he got to know so well that he called him a friend and yet believed that he was a war criminal and should have been hanged. In this 30 minute podcast , the first a six minutes is  telephone conversation recorded on 3rd November 2011 followed by extracts from his talk at the UK Space Conference 5th July 2011 “The von Braun that I knew”. Reg shares three of his audio interviews with von Braun, the audio quality of the 2nd and 3rd is better than

Artists impression - from http://www.skatelescope.org/ The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a global science and engineering project to build a revolutionary new radio telescope with extraordinary scientific ambitions. With funding from ten nations the building of the SKA will start in 2016 and be fully operational in 2024. It will tackle some of the profoundest questions of cosmology associated with organic molecules, gravitational waves,  pulsars orbiting black holes and light from the earliest stars that illuminated the universe. To do this the SKA will require super computers,  innovative new power stations and high speed communication links  that currently do not exist. This interview with Professor Michael Kramer was recorded in March 2012 at the National Astronomy Meeting in the University Manchester two months prior to the announcement that the Square Kilometre Array will be built in South Africa along with  Australia & New Zealand. Professor Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

Nik Szymanek If you have ever been to London and used the underground Tube service, it may well have been driven by the speaker in this episode. That is his day job but Nik Szymanek  is one of Britain’s best known astrophotographers. This interview was recorded during National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Manchester in 2012. Nik collaborates with Ian King and in this episode discusses how he got started, issues to consider for those moving in to astrophotograpy and how things have changed in this developing field. He also talks about another growing area of interest to amateur astronomers  - a personal remote telescope. David Ratledge another accomplished astrophotographer based in the north west of England has  some very useful links for astrophotography on his website http://www.deep-sky.co.uk/links.htm.    

The first  interview in this episode is with astronaut Joe Engle was recorded during his visit to the UK in 2008.   Joe Engle was at the front of the queue  to go to the Moon when NASA cut its Apollo program. His place was taken by the geologist Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 – the last manned mission to the Moon. In this interview Joe talk about his work before and after Apollo - on the X-15 and Space Shuttle programs. The second short interview with astronaut Ron Garan was recorded at TedXSalford in January 2012 (unfortunately the recording stopped prematurely).  You can see more about the online community offering a “unique orbital perspective of men and women who live and work in Space” online at Fragile Oasis.   You can see the video of his talk  on this link http://youtu.be/lJNbjSLvtpI

Launched 15 years ago today, the Cassini Huygens mission has been one of the outstanding successes of solar system exploration and a model of NASA ESA collaboration. In episode 14 Professor John Zarnecki spoke about the science conducted from the surface of Titan by the Huygens lander in January 2005. The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe had hitched a lift to Saturn aboard the Cassini orbiter. Six years after its arrival at Saturn, Cassini is still making spectacular discoveries about Saturn, its majestic rings and its many moons. In this episode, Professor Carl Murray from Queen Mary University London talks about some of those discoveries and how the mission will eventually come to an end. This interview was recorded during the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester in March 2012.

As the dinosaurs on the Earth 64 million years ago discovered, comets and asteroids have the potential for unexpected arrival with devastating consequences. The spectacular collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in July 1994 dramatically raised awareness and no doubt a little concern amongst the heads of governments across the planet. Since then, the British government has not really got engaged and so it is left to a handful of skilled and dedicated individuals through Spaceguarduk to provide the UK with its only organisation to address the hazards of Near Earth Objects. The fireball over Europe in September 2012, demonstrated the risks are with us today. The Spaceguard Centre was established by Jay Tate in 1997.

Ben Kepes When I speak to anyone in a time zone with a 12 hours difference and in opposite hemispheres it implies we are about as far as two people on the planet can be. You can play or download the recording at the bottom of this page. Ben is known for amongst other things, as the curator of CloudU. He has been speaking about Cloud Computing from a business perspectives long before it became trendy to do so. We spoke about CloudU,  CSA's CCSK and the future of Cloud Computing and its relationship with Open Source. Links to some of the topics we discussed include. CloudU Ben's Blog Future of Cloud Computing video from Oscon Cloud Security Alliance - Cloud Computing Security Knowledge and my blog post  discussing the pros and cons of CCSK.  

Since the mid 1970s six spacecraft (Viking 1 & 2, Sojourner, Opportunity, Spirit and Phoenix)  have successfully landed on the surface of Mars. In probably the most audacious, breathtaking and risky space missions, in less than two days, another  Mars Curiosity Rover will arrive on Mars. Using a technique never used before, NASA has described the Entry Decent Landing as the seven minutes of terror. Launched in November 2011, the arrival of Mars Curiosity will for the first time make a high precision landing which is so crucial to its primary scientific goal of finding evidence of earlier Martian environment that may have been suitable for life. Also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) it will be supported by a pair of NASA satellites (Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) already in Martian orbit. Mars has never been under so much human scrutiny. In addition to the still functioning Opportunity, a rover on the surface of Mars (launched in 2004) and the two NASA satellites, there is also the E