Thuravoor

Sreedhara Panicker Somanath was born in July 1963 at Thuravoor, in the Cherthala region of Alappuzha district, Kerala — backwater country, a long way in every sense from a launch pad. His father, Sreedhara Panicker, taught Hindi locally. Sixty years later his son would stand in the mission control room at Sriharikota as an Indian spacecraft touched down near the south pole of the Moon, somewhere no country had landed before.

He was educated in Malayalam-medium schooling in Kerala, took his B.Tech in mechanical engineering at the T. K. M. College of Engineering in Kollam, followed by a master's in aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where he specialised in structures, dynamics and control. He later completed a doctorate at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Thirty-Seven Years at ISRO

Somanath joined the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram in 1985 and worked on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle — the workhorse rocket that would go on to become one of the most reliable launchers in the world and the basis of India's commercial launch business.

His specialism was launch vehicle structures and systems engineering: the mechanical discipline of building a machine that must survive its own thrust. In 2010 he became project director of the GSLV Mark III, later renamed LVM3 — India's heaviest launcher, the vehicle that would carry Chandrayaan-2, Chandrayaan-3 and the country's crewed spaceflight ambitions. Bringing a heavy-lift rocket from design to flight is among the hardest tasks in engineering, and it is the achievement on which his technical reputation rests.

He was Director of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre from 2015 to 2018, and then Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre — ISRO's principal launch vehicle establishment — from 2018 to 2022.

Chairman

In January 2022 Somanath became Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation and Secretary of the Department of Space, the senior-most position in the Indian space programme. He held it until January 2025.

His tenure produced the most visible successes in ISRO's history. On 23 August 2023, the Chandrayaan-3 lander Vikram made a controlled soft landing in the lunar south polar region. India became the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon, and the first to do so near the south pole — a region of scientific interest because of suspected water ice in permanently shadowed craters, and a considerably harder landing site than the equatorial zones targeted by earlier missions.

The mission carried particular weight because Chandrayaan-2 had failed at almost the same point in 2019. Chandrayaan-3 was rebuilt around that failure: the team worked backwards from every way the landing could go wrong and designed for the failures rather than for the success case. Somanath explained the approach publicly afterwards, and it became one of the more widely discussed engineering lessons to come out of an Indian public institution.

Weeks later ISRO launched Aditya-L1, India's first dedicated solar observatory, placed at the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point to study the solar corona and solar wind continuously. His tenure also advanced the Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme and a substantial opening of the Indian space sector to private companies.

He also oversaw a significant widening of what ISRO does. During his chairmanship the agency moved further into commercial launches for foreign customers, transferred launch vehicle technology to Indian private industry, and began preparing the ground for a national space station and a crewed lunar objective. Much of that work is structural rather than spectacular, and it will be judged over decades rather than in a single evening of live television.

A Public Scientist

Somanath became, largely against the traditions of his organisation, a genuinely public figure. ISRO had historically been reticent; the Chandrayaan-3 landing was watched live by an enormous audience, and Somanath's calm, plainly spoken explanations — frequently in Malayalam as well as English — reached people who had never followed a space mission before.

He has been open about his own circumstances, including a cancer diagnosis he disclosed while in office, and about the ordinary Kerala schooling that preceded his career. That candour, from the head of the national space agency, did a good deal for the argument that a scientific career is available to children in small places.

His honours include the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award in 2023, induction into the International Astronautical Federation Hall of Fame in 2024, the Kerala Sasthra Puraskaram in 2025, and honorary doctorates from a number of universities. Since 2025 he has served as Chancellor of Chanakya University, Bengaluru.

What the Village Sent

India's space programme has long been disproportionately staffed from Kerala, largely because the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre was established at Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram, in the 1960s. Somanath's career is the fullest expression of that: a boy from a Hindi teacher's household in a Cherthala village entered the launch vehicle centre at twenty-two, spent nearly four decades on rockets, built India's heaviest launcher, and then ran the whole programme through the years in which it landed on the Moon and launched a Sun observatory.

Thuravoor is not on any map of global spaceflight. It produced the engineer who put India on one.