Wednesday 16 / July / 2025
Muscat: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) rocket scientist Nambi Narayanan will be visiting Oman to attend a book fair. Indian Social Club (ISC) will be organising the four-day book fest from April 11.
The exhibition and sale of books is being held in partnership with the Indian embassy. The fest seeks to celebrate 70 years of Indian independence.
The book fest will display more than 50,000 books in 12 languages, including Hindi, English, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic.
Interestingly, Narayanan was involved in India’s famous Mars mission dubbed Mangalyan. He said that he was excited to visit Oman. “This is my first visit to Muscat and I am looking forward to it,” he said.
“If I had to point out one achievement of mine, I would say it’s my contribution to the liquid propulsion technology for rockets and the Vikas engine, which was developed by me from scratch. This technology is used in the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), Chandrayan and Mangalyan missions,” he added.
Stating that while he was proud of India’s Mangalyan mission, he said India needed to do more in space research.
“Mangalyan and Chandrayan are our only two space satellites. We need to have a budget for and do large scale research on how human bodies can stay and work in space,” he said.
“Then, the next step can be a manned Earth Station. This needs planning and funding and it can be a huge and profitable business. Just like NASA is for the Americans and European Space Agency (ESA) for Europe, we should have an ASA, that is Asian Space Agency for Asia, because no one country can afford the full cost of space exploration. It has to be a collaboration,” Narayanan said.
The ISRO scientist disclosed that he had been looking forward to a movie that was being made based on his life.
“I do not watch movies, but I am excited about the movie that will be made on my life soon. The movie is being made in consultation with me. It is based on my autobiography ‘Ready To Fire’,” he said. “It touches on the early days of India’s space programme, the evolution of ISRO and an account of the experiences and challenges faced while working there. The movie is expected to be released in early 2019 and R Madhavan will be playing me in the movie,” Narayanan remarked.
He added that it was one of his dreams to establish a society in outer space as a means to escape a fast-deteriorating planet.
“My dream is to create a society to go to in outer space, a 250km orbit around the Earth called a near-earth orbit,” he added.
“Eventually, we will need to travel and escape from our planet, since we are destroying it at a fast rate. It is my dream to see human beings living in space as a space society,” the scientist added.
