Graphic: slingshot to the moon

Standing at the bottom of his garden, cup of coffee in hand, Gopinath Garirao, 63, peered into the dawn sky and marvelled as the Indian rocket streaked into orbit, fuelled by the hopes of a billion people.

When he was born in 1945 India was still under British colonial rule and more than two years away from the bloody chaos of Partition.

He joined the Indian Railways as an engineer in 1969 – the year that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon – and worked there until he retired in 2005, on a pension of £100 a month. He has lived through one war with China and three with Pakistan.

There he was, standing outside with his wife, Kalavati Bai, watching the launch of Chandrayaan1 – India’s first unmanned mission to the Moon – from his own back garden.

“I felt very proud to be an Indian,” he told The Times from his home in Sullurpet, six miles from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Yesterday’s launch is especially resonant for Mr Garirao’s generation, who are old enough to have lived through Partition and then witnessed India’s recent reemergence as a world power.

It is not just a landmark for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which has launched dozens of satellites since its founding in 1969 but has never before sent an object beyond the Earth’s orbit.

If successful it will catapult India into the world’s most elite club, ranking it alongside the United States, Russia, Japan and China as the only countries capable of independently reaching the Moon.

It will also mark the beginning of what some experts describe as a 21st century Asian version of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. India is now jostling with China and Japan – Asia’s two dominant powers – to send a man to the Moon by 2025. Even South Korea has its own ambitious space programme.

“In the 20th century the race to the Moon was fought between the erstwhile Cold War adversaries,” said Pallava Bagla, the author of Destination Moon, a history of ISRO.

“In the 21st century those gladiators have been left behind and the Asian nations, on the upsurge, have decided to take their place,” he said. “Chandrayaan is a scientific mission, but it also has implications for global geopolitics. It’s like a coming-out party for India.”

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