New Delhi: 46 years ago, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam inaugurated India’s first satellite launch vehicle (SLV) on 18 July 1980, as project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation. In 2026, on the same date, space-tech company Skyroot Aerospace launched the country’s first private launch vehicle, completing a full-circle moment for India’s space sector — in the same month that marks Dr Kalam’s death anniversary.
Skyroot’s successful Vikram-I launch, which carried a tiny gold sculpture of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam to space with it, was a testament to Kalam’s own role in nation-building.
As the President of India, Principal Scientific Adviser to the government, Director General at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and aeronautical engineer at ISRO, Dr Kalam donned many hats over his 83 years of life. Yet what he most wanted to be remembered as was a teacher.
After he took charge of India’s missile programme at DRDO, which earned him the moniker ‘Missile Man of India’, Kalam worked as a professor at Anna University in Chennai in 2001. He continued teaching after his tenure as the President of India from 2002 to 2007 ended, taking up various positions at Anna University, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and Indian Institute of Management, Shillong.
It was at Shillong, while delivering a lecture to students on 27 July 2015, that he suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the age of 83.
Kalam’s first flight
In 1940, Kalam was in school in Rameshwaram. His school teacher Sivasubramania Iyer was explaining to his class how birds could fly. He told them all about the aerodynamics of their bodies, the light feathers, and the formations used by the birds to fly. Yet, 10-year-old Kalam still could not understand what made birds fly.
When he told his teacher point blank, Iyer decided to take another approach and took the children down to the Rameshwaram shore to show how birds flew. This one lesson, conducted at the edge of the Indian peninsula, shaped much of Kalam’s professional life, he said in retellings later.
“For me, it was not merely an understanding of how a bird flies. From that evening, I thought that my future study has to be with reference to flight and flight systems,” said Kalam in a speech he delivered in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, in 2005.
Kalam credits much of his life’s achievements to this one incident in his childhood with his teacher. In his speeches to school students too, he repeatedly emphasised the value of a good teacher, and how teachers transform lives.
“A teacher’s role in nation-building … is to put the students’ decades ahead,” said Dr Kalam in a speech in 2003.
For higher studies, Kalam went on to study at the Madras Institute of Technology in Chennai, where he specialised in aeronautical engineering. While he wanted to be a pilot for the Indian Air Force, he missed the opportunity narrowly, which caused him great distress. In his book Wings of Fire, Kalam wrote about how a sadhu (Hindu ascetic) in Rishikesh, Swami Sivanand, taught him how he should not lose heart.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear – How true! Here was the teacher to show the way to a student who had nearly gone astray,” wrote Kalam in his autobiography.
Kalam developed an indigenous hovercraft at the Defence Research and Development Service, and then worked on India’s first rocket and satellite launches under Vikram Sarabhai at the Indian National Committee for Space Research. At both these institutions, Kalam flourished as a scientist as well as a student. His writings and speeches from that time mention how everything — from the food in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh to seeing a Tipu Sultan painting in NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in the US — was a learning experience for him. His mentors Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan and UR Rao were some of the most formidable scientists in Indian space history.
At the time, Kalam was deeply involved with the beginnings of India’s indigenous space programme: from the first Rohini rocket built in 1967, to the first Indian satellite launch vehicle (SLV), to the choice of Sriharikota as the preferred launch site for Indian rockets.
Kalam’s legacy
When Kalam left ISRO for DRDO in 1985, he left a legacy for his juniors, who admired his work and ideals. This was the year that S Somanath, the former chairman of ISRO, had joined the organisation as a young scientist.
“When I joined, I didn’t get a chance to work directly with Kalam. Yet everywhere I looked, there were younger versions of Kalam. He left a lasting impression on the scientists who had worked under him,” said Somanath in a speech while commemorating Kalam’s birth anniversary in Rameshwaram in 2023.
When he was teaching at Anna University in 2001, Kalam would wake up each morning in his guest house and listen to Carnatic music. Then he would venture on his morning walk. Every day, students would wait outside his accommodation, eager to ask him questions during the walk.
Kalam’s principles were deceptively simple when it came to science — he knew that science begins from questions.
He insisted on allowing children to ask questions, as it was the only way to build curiosity and scientific temperament in them. For Kalam the scientist, and Kalam the teacher, questions were the centre of a student’s life.
“Science was born and survives only by questions. The whole foundation of science is questioning. And as parents and teachers well know, children are the source of unending questions. Hence, a child is the first scientist,” he said in response to a question asked during his tenure as President.
(Edited by Aakriti Handa)