Wings of fire - Sir APJ ABDUL KALAM Wings of fire | Page 59

Thrusters
H
aving taken up the leadership of executing the SLV-3
project, I faced urgent and conflicting demands on my time
—for
committee
work,
material
procurement,
correspondence,
reviews, briefings, and for the need to be informed on a
wide range of subjects.
My day would start with a stroll of about 2 km around the
lodge I was living in. I used to prepare a general schedule
during my morning walk, and emphasize two or three things
I would definitely like to accomplish during the day,
including at least one thing that would help achieve long-
term goals.
Once in the office, I would clean the table first. Within the
next ten minutes, I would scan all the papers and quickly
divide them into different categories: those that required
immediate action, low priority ones, ones that could be kept
pending, and reading material. Then I would put the high
priority papers in front of me and everything else out of
sight.
Coming back to SLV-3, about 250 sub-assemblies and
44 major subsystems were conceived during the design.
The list of materials went up to over 1 million components.
A project implementation strategy had become essential to
achieve sustained viability of this complex programme of
seven to ten years’ duration. From his side, Prof. Dhawan
came up with a clear statement that all the manpower and
funds at VSSC and SHAR would have to be directed to us.
From our side, we evolved a matrix type of management to
achieve productive interfacing with more than 300
industries. The target was that our interaction with them
must lead to their technology empowerment. Three things I
stressed before my colleagues—importance of design
capability, goal setting and realisation, and the strength to
withstand setbacks. Now, before I dwell on the finer
aspects of the management of the SLV-3 project, let me
talk about the SLV-3 itself.
It is interesting to describe a launch vehicle
anthropomorphically. The main mechanical structure may
be visualized as the body of a human being, the control and
guidance systems with their associated electronics
constitute the brain. The musculature comes from
propellants. How are they made? What are the materials
and techniques involved?
A large variety of materials go into the making of a
launch vehicle— both metallic and non-metallic, which
include composites and ceramics. In metals, different types
of stainless steel, alloys of aluminium, magnesium, titanium,
copper, beryllium, tungsten and molybdenum are used.
Composite materials are composed of a mixture or
combination of two or more constituents which differ in form
and material composition and which are essentially
insoluble in one another. The materials which combine may
be metallic, organic or inorganic. While other material
combinations possible are virtually unlimited, the most
typical composites in launch vehicles are made of structural
constituents, embedded in a matrix. We used a large
variety of glass fibre reinforced plastic composites and
opened avenues for the entry of Kevlar, polyamides and
carbon-carbon composites. Ceramics are special types of
baked clay used for microwave transparent enclosures. We
considered using ceramics, but had to reject the idea then
due to technological limitations.