![]() ![]() India built its first satellite Aryabhata, and launched it in 1975. In subsequent years, however, Pakistan’s space program severely lagged due to the political turmoil which enveloped the country. It also put up fellowships and research associate programs at American universities for "advanced training and experience" in the field of space. Read on: Footprints: No space for AhmadisĪccording to a report of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, before the June 1962 launch, NASA had started training Pakistani scientists at Wallops Island and the Goddard Space Flight Centers. With this experiment, Pakistan became the third country in Asia, first in South Asia, and only the 10th country in the world to have conducted such a launch. On 7 June 1962, Pakistan launched an unmanned rocket, Rehbar-I from Sonmiani, with assistance from NASA.ĭr Tariq Mustafa led the team working on this project. Pakistan quickly bagged the offer, and started working on the project. On the occasion, NASA offered help to Pakistan in the development and launching of rockets to map the atmosphere above Indian Ocean, on the condition that any data acquired from the research on upper atmosphere will be shared with NASA.ĭr Abdus Salam helped set up Pakistan's space organisation before India had founded theirs. In mid-September 1961, Dr Abdus Salam and Dr Tariq Mustafa held a meeting with NASA officials in Washington. In 1960, President John F Kennedy had announced that the United States planned to land an American on the moon, and bring him safely back to earth before the decade was over.ĭr Tariq Mustafa, a scientist at Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s, writes in his memoir that for this project, NASA needed to map the wind conditions at the upper atmospheric region above the Indian Ocean. SUPARCO was set up by the most famous of all Pakistani scientists and the country’s only Nobel Laureate: Dr Abdus Salam.ĭr Salam had advised Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan, then President of Pakistan to establish a Space Sciences Research Wing within Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. While the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was established in 1969, the same year when humans set foot on the moon, Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) was established in 1961 – eight years before its Indian counterpart. What was the condition of India and Pakistan at that time? The two countries had already fought two battles, and were about to plunge into another one in 1971. The United States, being the most technologically advanced country on Earth, put that feather in its hat about 45 years ago. In contrast, the moons of Mars- Phobos and Deimos-have made only sporadic appearances in fiction.This article was originally published in September 2014ġ969 was the year, when the United States succeeded in landing humans on the moon – our closest neighbour in space – and safely bringing them back to Earth. In the year 2000, science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl estimated the total number of works of fiction dealing with Mars up to that point to exceed five thousand, and the planet has continued to make frequent appearances across various genres and mediums since. Stories of the first human mission to Mars appeared throughout the 1990s in response to the Space Exploration Initiative, and near-future exploration and settlement became increasingly common themes following the launches of additional Mars exploration probes in the latter half of the decade. Terraforming Mars to enable human habitation has been another major theme, especially in the final quarter of the century, with the most prominent example being Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. A significant minority of works nevertheless persisted in portraying Mars in a nostalgic way that was by then scientifically outdated, including Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. The theme of colonizing Mars replaced stories about native inhabitants of the planet in the second half of the 1900s following emerging evidence of the planet being inhospitable to life, eventually confirmed by data from Mars exploration probes. Besides these, more exotic lifeforms appeared in stories like Stanley G. Apart from enlightened as in the utopian works from the turn of the century, or evil as in the works inspired by Wells, intelligent and human-like Martians also began to be depicted as decadent, a portrayal that was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Barsoom series and adopted by Leigh Brackett among others. Life on Mars appeared frequently in fiction throughout the first half of the 1900s. Wells's The War of the Worlds is one of the most influential works of science fiction. ![]()
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