It all started sometime in the mid-March 2008. Karthik was generally talking about places we can go to once Rakesh comes back from his US trip as it had been a while we all went out. Karthik mentioned that he may not be around on the weekend of April 26/27 as he plans to visit Sriharikota. Cartosat-2A was to be launched on April 28th along with 9 other satellites riding on the PSLV - C9 rocket. Karthik’s friend Sethu, who works in ISRO had invited him to witness the launch.

I said to him, you are not going. We all are going :). Girish also decided to join us on the trip. Rakesh is in the US. We do not mention anything to him yet since there was a lot of time and things were still a bit unsure. By the time Rakesh came back we forgot to mention about the trip to him. Around April 20th, Karthik and myself start talking about booking the tickets for the trip. Rakesh wondered what we were talking about. It was a nice surprise for Rakesh, even though we had not planned it that way :).

There is no direct train from Bangalore to Sriharikota. We decide to go on the single direct bus that goes there. When we are booking the tickets, Rakesh notices that there are only 2 seats available for the return journey. He books them immediately. Karthik and Girish decide to visit Tirupati on the way back and hence will reach Bangalore the next day.

After spending a nice Saturday in Bangalore, we left for Sulurpet late in the evening. Sulurpet is a major town close to Sriharikota. We reached there early in the morning on Sunday. There are thousands of ISRO staff quarters in the outskirts on the town. We expecting the bus to be a normal khatara bus. To our surprise, the bus was A/C and the padding on the seats was sufficiently comfortable. The bus journey turned out to be much more comfortable than we had expected. It seemed a good start to a great trip.

The staff quarters were amazing. We went to have breakfast at the canteen in the sports club. The crystal clear swimming pool there was so inviting as we tried to fight the blistering heat. Alas, we could not take a dip there. Knowing that there isn’t much we can do/ see at the place, we start playing cricket. The Sun decided that it will not allow us to play more than one game. Lunch was also pretty good. After lazing around during the afternoon, we left for Pulicat bird sanctuary in the evening. It was off-season so we managed to spot only a few on them. When we came back, we got to see lots of fire engines coming. We were in Andhra Pradesh, but we could see that quite a few of those had even come from Tamil Nadu. The sheer number of fire engines just amazed us.

There is a talk going on about a trough forming in the Bay of Bengal because of which the launch may have to be delayed but we will get to know more only in the morning. We woke up early and left for SDSC at SHAR around 7 a.m. It was a nice sunny morning with a clear sky. The launch was scheduled for 9.23 a.m and the good news was that the trough will not cause any trouble for the launch. We reached there at about 8 a.m and had the breakfast quickly. We were all excited and could not wait to get to the view point. Sethu wanted us to relax and see around for a while but he could not relax so many curious people He having seen so many launches was quite relaxed. We all had been bugging him with questions and doubts of various related things since the time we had reached one day before. The view points were essentially the terraces of sufficiently tall buildings like the hospital, hostel, the admin area, etc. Tents were placed for to help people beat the heat.

I was still about 50 minutes to the launch. We sat in a conference room in the hospital watching the pre-launch proceedings of the control center. About 15 minutes before the launch, the head of ISRO, Madhavan Nair after receiving inputs about various related parameters unlocked the launch key. The launch would now be taken over by a computer in a few minutes and the computer will decide to halt the launch in case it notices something going wrong. We head for the hospital terrace at about 8 minutes before the launch.

There was a huge crowd at the terrace. People had even managed to climb areas on the terrace to which the stairs had been removed as they were dangerous to stand at. The crowd joined the commentator in chorus for the countdown: 10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… and then there was silence, but not for long. After a few seconds, as it emerged from the back of the trees the crowd came to life again. Everyone clapped and shouted in happiness.

The view was simply amazing. We started to hear the sound after a few seconds as well as it traveled slower than the light. We could feel the vibrations in the ground as well. The view was so awesome that one really cannot describe it in words. It was out of sight in less than a minute

After this we left for the main Sulurpet town for lunch. After having a nice meal we came back to the staff quarters and to take rest. Karthik and Girish left for Tirupati. They wanted to visit another temple en route. Rakesh and myself took some more rest before we left in the evening.

As we got in the bus we saw that someone else was sitting at our seats. The conductor was confused as well how two people managed to book the same seat. On further careful inspection, we noticed that our ticket was a week old. Yes, when we were booking the tickets apparently the KSRTC website had shown that day’s date while we expected it to have auto-filled the date we had selected in the previous step. Luckily there were enough seats available in the bus and we were carrying barely enough cash to buy them. The backs of the seats we got did not lock into position and it was as if we were suspended in the air. As soon as any speed breaker came, the back of the seat would swing like a pendulum. Then we came to know that the bus will stop for dinner only at 1 a.m. It seemed like Murphy’s law was in action. Thankfully nothing else went wrong and we reached Bangalore

See also: Karthik’s blog entry about the same trip, some of the trip photos.