I Consider Rockets Like A Baby, Says ISRO Chairman S Somanath After Successful Launch Of Chandrayaan-3

"As an engineer and scientist, I have a love for rockets. I consider the rocket like a baby," ISRO chairman S Somanath said.

Expressing his deep love and association with rockets, ISRO chairman S Somanath said on Saturday that he considers the launch vehicles as babies. Somanath said he enjoyed the launch of Phase-I of Chandrayaan-3 on Friday, while adding that he had gone through the entire data and marvelled at "how beautiful the rocket was".

ISRO successfully launched its third moon mission on Friday, this time a far more complicated 41-day voyage to reach the lunar south pole, where no other country has gone before. The space agency said the technically challenging soft landing on the lunar surface, which Chandrayaan-2 could not achieve, has been planned for 5.47 pm on August 23.

Delivering his address at the 12th Convocation of IIT Hyderabad in neighbouring Sangareddy district, Somanath said, "As an engineer and scientist, I have a love for rockets. I consider the rocket like a baby, seeing its birth, its growth, its problems of growth, its emotions, and developing a deep understanding of its mechanics and dynamics and its life as such." Referring to the previous Chandrayaan-2 launch, he said it had almost 2,000 measurements that were coordinated and were in the form of graphs and curves.