Gulab jamuns inspired Srimathy Kesan and her team of seven teenagers to develop tiny satellites the size of delicious round syrupy desserts. They built a palm-sized satellite for less than Rs. 10 lakh and launched it into space aboard a NASA rocket in 2017. Since then, Kesan has expanded her space evangelism.
As the founder and CEO of Space Kidz India (SKI), Kesan became the first Indian to engage teenage girls from rural government schools and juvenile homes in satellite building. On 10 February, ISRO’s SSLV-D2 mission launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, was carrying a precious payload — an 8 kg satellite built by 750 girls under the age of 15.
“Could anyone have imagined that? This proves that we can achieve anything,” said G Sathyavani, a Class 9 student from Avvaiyar Government Girls School, in Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu.
Since starting SKI in 2013, Kesan and her army of teenagers have built five satellites, four of which reached orbit. The fifth didn’t due to launch vehicle failure.
“We did not have much support when we started out with our dream, and now kids under the age of 15 have built satellites,” said Kesan, who also happens to be the first Indian woman to experience zero gravity as a civilian, and was an outreach ambassador for the American NASA, European ESA, and Russian Roscosmos space agencies where she escorted students to space agencies all over the world.
Last year, when India celebrated 75 years of Independence, SKI unfurled the Tiranga at the edge of space.
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Start with space balloon
Nobody took Kesan seriously when she roped children to build satellites and payloads, and write codes.
Back in 2015, a small SKI team of ten Class 9 students made a detailed presentation on their vision for the lightest satellite ever — the KalamSAT. Weighing merely 64 g, it was a cube of 3.8 cm that would be 3D printed out of carbon fibre.
The satellite was designed by a three-member team led by Rifath Sharook, who was 16 years old at the time and is now working with SKI as lead scientist. The response to their ideas was a huge blow.
“A couple of very senior well-known scientists in the country told me to stop spoiling children’s futures and get them to focus on studying first,” said Kesan. So, she turned to NASA’s Director of the Florida Space Grant Consortium at the University of Central Florida, Jaydeep Mukherjee. “He suggested that we start out with stratospheric balloons instead of aiming directly to go to orbit.”
Disappointed, but unwilling to give up, the SKI team gave the balloon idea a shot. Kesan signed a bond of Rs 10 lakh with the Airport Authority of India before DGCA gave clearance for launch — mere hours before it was due. According to Kesan, multiple senior government officials refused to visit or attend the launch, dismissing it as a children’s project.
But all the birthing pains and last-minute glitches were forgotten on 14 August 2015, when SKI launched the 5-metre-wide balloon from the grounds of Hindustan University in Chennai. It was a roaring success for an experimental balloon built by teenagers. It was launched at 11 am, functioned perfectly with trackers and sensors providing accurate data, and reached a height of 1,07,000 ft (28km) before it was successfully retrieved at 3:30 pm.
The team was ecstatic. Their success convinced them more than ever to start building satellites.
The balloon launch did not receive much media attention, but Kesan’s LinkedIn and Facebook posts were noticed by Texas-based Exos Aerospace. The company reached out and offered SKI space in their reusable test rocket for a 1 kg payload.
Kesan invested her own money into the project and also collected funds to build the payload. They had to import sensors from the UK and Germany, and pay exorbitant customs fees of up to 77 per cent. Despite technical glitches, they finally managed to build the SKI SAT with 27 sensors and ship it to Texas in 2017, where it made a suborbital flight on a sounding rocket.
The gulab jamun satellite
The teenagers who were part of this mission were exuberant as they watched their satellite launch on a big screen in SKI’s T-Nagar office in Chennai. They demanded Kesan make gulab jamuns, which then led them down a whole other engineering path for satellites.
“After I made the gulab jamuns, the kids were just sitting and examining one,” says Kesan. They had a Eureka moment. “Building big satellites is expensive and launch costs go into crores [of rupees]. Why not build a satellite the size of this gulab jamun.”
Serendipitously, almost at the same time, NASA announced an engineering competition that was in its fourth year, where they solicited proposals for payloads that weighed less than 64 g, which they would launch for free.
SKI submitted its proposal in January 2017, which was accepted in March. It was their opportunity to build the KalamSat. The Rs 8 lakh worth palm-sized satellite was launched in June on NASA’s Terrier Orion sounding rocket for a suborbital flight, after which the payload was retrieved.
“Working with Dr Kesan was the best thing that had happened to me,” said Sharook, looking back at his maiden satellite “Doing things fast became our culture even before the startup trend entered the space industry.” He even got featured in the US media for building the world’s lightest satellite.
The launch brought sudden and overwhelming global media attention, propelling Space Kidz India into the recognisable space scene.
Suddenly, scientists in India started taking note of SKI’s satellites and the children building them. And finally, ISRO, India’s space organisation that SKI had been trying to pitch to for years, knocked on its doors. ISRO asked SKI to give a presentation and gave Kesan six days to build and deliver.
The team ran helter-skelter for parts and worked furiously to improve upon their designs. After five sleepless nights, they delivered a 1U (10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm cube) satellite, the Rs 33 lakh KalamSat-V2. The satellite flew on the PSLV C44 mission in January 2019 and reached orbit successfully.
It was then that Kesan started thinking about Indian rural school students, especially girls. So far, all the teenagers SKI had worked with had been boys.
She decided that for India’s 75th Independence celebrations in August 2022, she wanted to involve 750 rural girls, who would otherwise not have access to space technology—from at least 10 government schools nationwide— for “something big”.
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Reaching ISRO from ICU
At the time, the pandemic was cutting a swathe of devastation across the country. Kesan contracted Covid and ended up in the ICU on a ventilator in 2021.
All through her illness, she and the SKI team reached out to schools using NITI Aayog’s public government school data. They contacted nearly 100 schools across all states and UTs except Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram where not a single school was reachable, according to Kesan. Ten girls were picked by their respective science teachers from each school.
Kesan presented her proposal to ISRO from the ICU and got a slot for the payload in the new SSLV that was about to perform its test launch.
Then the real work started: training Class 8, 9, and 10 girls, most of whom were not familiar with circuit boards, coding, or computers. The SKI team taught them basic circuitry and coding (Python, Intel 8085) over Zoom. Under the supervision of their teachers and SKI, the girls built the circuitry, which was assembled in Chennai.
“No one had ever built an expandable satellite before in India,” said Kesan, proudly. “On earth it is 8U (80cmx80cmx80cm), but in space it opens up to 64 times its size,” she explained. The August 2022 launch of the SSLV, for which many students had gathered at Sriharikota, was a failure. The Rs 68 lakh satellite burned up along with the rocket in the atmosphere.
SKI turned its attention to building another satellite named AzadiSAT-2. It was launched in February 2023, again on an ISRO SSLV test flight, and entered into orbit successfully.
“Kesan has given our students opportunities we could have never imagined. Just building a single satellite has made our girls famous, and many other children come and tell us they’ve been inspired and want to build satellites too,” said dean Kannan AHM, from Thirumangalam Government Girls Higher Secondary School, Madurai.
The girls who participated in building the satellites have become local celebrities.
“Ma’am (Kesan) has given us a dream we never thought we could dream, and she has already helped a large part of it come true,” said Khushbu S, a class 9 student from Government Higher Secondary School, Velachery.
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Funding NASA trips
Kesan stumbled into space by accident. While attending a business conference in Miami, Florida in 2009, she walked into a NASA booth where she met a former astronaut.
“I spent three days just talking to the people at the NASA booth,” she says. “When they asked me what I wanted to do, I said I didn’t know. What options do they have, and just asked them to tell me what I could do for NASA.”
She learned that children from all over the world can attend three-day space camps at various NASA centres. It’s how she became a NASA ambassador for its space camps, escorting children from India to the US.
Kesan, originally from Hyderabad, was an athletic student who graduated with a commerce degree in 1993. She had been an NCC cadet leading the Andhra student contingent, and harboured dreams of entering into the armed forces. But after her second year of college, she got married at the age of 18. She started to lend her voice to documentaries and perform choreography, and other assorted artistic stints. It would take another 16 years and the birth of her daughter before she would venture into the world of business.
Her first stint as an ambassador for NASA saw her juggle logistical issues, visa troubles and struggle to gather 108 children whom she was escorting from India to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2010.
At the time, it cost each child Rs 1.8 lakh. Kesan was able to scrounge up funds for the daughters of a few truck drivers and farmers. Since 2013, her bootstrapped company and a few private donors have been funding such trips, while Hexaware Technologies have funded domestic trips.
“Repeatedly touching these rockets and satellites made them kind of get into my soul, I wanted to build a satellite,” says Kesan.
In 2017, she was invited to give a lecture alongside Stephen Hawking in China. He passed away before the lecture happened, but Kesan describes the invitation as one of the most precious moments in her life.
+Sword to spatula to space
Kesan wants to make Indians as excited about ISRO as Americans are about NASA.
“In the US, anything NASA garners major attention. Here, even on Mann Ki Baat, there was no mention of SSLV,” she said. “People don’t recognise space pioneers. We know more about NASA than we do about ISRO.”
In December 2022, she signed up to go on the first commercial zero gravity flight in the US, becoming the first Indian woman to experience it (Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawla were Americans when they flew). The trip cost her $10,000 and she remembered unfurling the Indian flag while the plane dipped down in its parabolic path for the free-fall experience.
“When you wear the suit and experience the fall, it is out of this world. The feeling is incredible, and I really want children and adults in India to experience it,” she said.
She hopes to be able to do this in a space research park that she would like to build in Sriharikota, near the ISRO facility, where tourists regularly come to see launches.
“The children I took to the US went to flying schools and actually flew. But these experiences should be available in India without having to shell out so much money for an international trip. Our children should learn things that our scientists can teach, and that needs an exciting platform,” she says.
In her vision, the research park will consist of simulators, experiments and demonstrations, areas for regular lectures, a museum, a space gift shop, astronaut training centres, a replica of the Gaganyaan capsule, mock Mars, and moon settlements. It will be a place where children can learn how to fly drones, launch balloons and participate in space camps.
The idea has been pitched to chief ministers of multiple states and even to PM Modi, who have all received it enthusiastically, she said.
Kesan wants to involve more students in her space projects, especially those from tier-2 and tier-3 towns rather than IITs. Her team is already familiar with villages as they have travelled for space education awareness, and they hope to expand their reach.
“Rural kids can’t be spending Rs 3-4 lakh to be able to experience space-related stuff abroad, we are capable of doing incredible things here and we have the knowledge. We just need political leaders and maybe industrialists to prioritise such projects and make them a reality,” Kesan says.
Kesan dreams of a world where anything is possible. She has set her sights on something much higher up in space—space rickshaws. With private companies funding rockets and trips to space, SKI is working on its first prototype of a space bus, the structure around which a spacecraft can be built.
“We plan to build a space rickshaw that can ferry around passengers from earth to orbit or orbit to the moon eventually. Many companies have started work on this around the world,” says Kesan. It’s easy to dismiss these ambitious plans as castles in the air. But she has repeatedly proved naysayers wrong— she traded her NCC-Indian Army uniform to raise her family and later reached for the stars.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)