Newsmaker: K Radhakrishnan

Reaching for the stars

You could say his stars are on the ascendant. Having been the face- and the force-behind India's ambitious space mission to reach Mars' orbit, K Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), can rest assured that he has made it to the history books.

It is just as well that Radhakrishan's professional interest lay in the vast ether above Earth. The avionics engineer is a strong believer in God. In fact, before the Mars Orbiter Mission was launched from Sriharikota on November 5, he had visited the temples at Guruvayoor and Tirupati with a replica of ISRO's PSLV rocket to plead for success before the deities. Presumably, he is even now praying that the mission proves fruitful when the Mangalyaan spacecraft reaches the Martian atmosphere in September 2014.

A senior scientist at ISRO says, "Our system works on the principle that the boss is always right." A perfectionist, Radhakrishnan has always been a hands-on boss, first at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, where he started his career as a young scientist in 1971, and later at ISRO, where he took over as chairman when the agency was facing intense scrutiny over the Devas deal.

Radhakrishnan, 64, micro-managed the entire mission to Mars, even ensuring that it was always he who spoke to the media about the project. He wanted no miscommunication to spoil the most challenging assignment of his life. Some say that the gentle scientist's single-minded devotion could be attributed to his desire to be known as Mars Man, rather like his predecessors at ISRO, Missile Man APJ Abdul Kalam and Moon Man Madhavan Nair. But that would be belittling the opinion he held that the Mars mission was necessary to show the world that India was capable of interplanetary exploration.

Now that the Mangalyaan spacecraft is safely on its 400 million-km journey, Radhakrishnan will probably find more time for himself. He loves Carnatic music and is an exponent of the Kathakali dance form.