History
Sriharikota island was chosen in 1969 for a satellite launching station.
The centre became operational 1971 when an RH-125 sounding rocket was launched. The first attempted launch of an orbital satellite, Rohini 1A aboard a Satellite Launch Vehicle, took place 10 Aug 1979, but due to a failure in thrust vectoring of the rocket's second stage, the satellite's orbit decayed 19 Aug 1979.
SHAR was named as 'Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR' (SDSC), on 5 September 2002, in memory of Prof Satish Dhawan, former Chairman of the ISRO.
The SHAR facility now consists of two launch pads, with the second built in 2005. The second launch pad was used for launches beginning in 2005 and is a universal launch pad, accommodating all of the launch vehicles used by ISRO. The two launch pads will allow multiple launches in a single year, which was not possible earlier. India's lunar orbiter Chandrayaan 1 launched from the centre at 6:22 AM IST on 22 October 2008.
SHAR will be the main base for the Indian human spaceflight program. A new third launchpad will built specifically to meet the target of launching a manned space mission by 2017.
Read more about this topic: Satish Dhawan Space Centre
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)