As John Kennedy, the ever inspiring president of the USA said and I quote “The goal of education is advancement of learning and the dissemination of truth”, education thereby stands to be the passport to the cryptic future ahead of us. It is an insight into the unsolved and unknown that lays in store for us.
Suppose someone asked you to name the master secret of the ages. What would you answer? Quantum Energy? Time Travel? Black Holes? AI & Machine Learning? No, it is not any of these. Then, what is this master secret? Where can one find it? Well, restricting the stream of thoughts to ourselves, the answer is extraordinarily simple. This secret is the marvelous, miracle-working power found in our own subconscious mind, waiting to be unleashed. This is the last place most people look for it, which is the reason so few ever find it. To explore the endless bounty of nature, to find our passion and act in accordance, to find our purpose deep within that makes us alive and human in true sense. That is a puzzle to everyone, and the biggest single mystery in this Universe.
In order to compel ourselves to unlock this power, we need to ignite ideas that break down boundaries and implement them to the best of our intellect and intuition. Which will help us creating a bright future for the nation and the world as a whole.
Keeping up with the ideas of innovation, intellect and intuitive endeavors, let me take you through one such beguiling journey of the talk of the town, VSSUT SATELLITE LAUNCH VEHICLE (VSLV) through a simple codified attempt of what I call the A B C D's for solving the unsolved!
A stands for Ambition. Well, ambition is the very basis, the foundation of any idea. Some of the most reputed and elite institutions across the globe have engraved their names in the pages of Student Space Missions, by building and launching their student satellites. Sparking a fire, we drew inspiration from them and the journey of our team kickstarted to bring space research down to a remote and small town of Burla. We started to pursue the Student Satellite Academia Programme of ISRO,.. Hence the name VSSUT Student Satellite. We realized that we could develop a student satellite by acquiring and assembling electronics and components, which would hardly take us six to eight months. But materializing an association or understanding with private or govt space agencies to launch our satellite, would take a decade or so considering the constraints of working out from a such a remote place, amidst the clumsy govt administration, with meagre funds. So, It gradually dawned upon us what could be more crazier than building a satellite? … Building a Launch Vehicle ourselves that could carry our satellite! Hence, considering a greater challenge, going out-of-the-box and taking the road not taken, VSLV was born with just the onset of a posthumous idea, with an ambition to be India’s first student rocketry mission. And that ambition has made all the difference.
B for Bold. We need to be brave, need to have the guts to take risk. To have eternal Belief in ourselves. We need to step out of comfort zones to take risks, to believe in our knowledge. Two years ago we a bunch of like-minded people started with zero, with scratch. We had no funding, no mentors, no dedicated workspace. Well, the beginnings have the most struggles but faith in our work, and belief on each other carried us through. The first step, before anyone else in the world believes it, is you have to believe it. It might scare you, might send chills down your spine but you must remain bold.
C : Confidence; The key to turn an idea into reality is Confidence. The faith and capability to be able to outperform along our way. From pitching in our idea at cross national platforms to representing India at International forums, Confidence in our work and faith in the team have mined us into diamonds in a coalfield. With great ideas come great responsibilities and the biggest of them all is to stay focused and concise in what has to be done. Our focus takes us through laborious technical days, solving tedious glitches, pitching our ideas in front of plausible sponsors.
D: Dedication and undeterred determination; A team that never fails to meet deadlines. Our project has been through various stages of development. The first involved ideation which was followed by building the prototype. And we have never looked back, ever since! Everyday has been dedicated to building prototypes that take us closer to our dream. Converting vacations into working days, turning beds into workbenches, hostel backyard into test sites, working tirelessly in and out round the clock. It all costs determination.
E stands for Enthusiasm; each day brings new opportunities to make amends into the existing prototype to make it more legit and stand out as a viable invention in the long run. After all 100% percent of innovation is driven by the ability to fail quickly but take it in an enthusiastic stride, learn from it and evolve. Be it procuring another sponsor, or debugging another error, or optimizing our designs. The curiosity that makes us jump out from our beds every morning.
F: Failure; Every venture is a sum total of all times, the good ones and the not so good ones. Failures make success even more cherished. Failures teach more lessons than any success ever could! With a broad thinking which accommodates all possibilities of a failure, hoping for the best but expecting the worst, we take a stride forward every time a new version is added to the testing phase of the VSLV. We would have had at least several dozens of failures. During out initial stages, we would build a small-scale model rocket, …fit it into our launch rod. With all our excitement, we would hail Jai Maa Samaleswari ! Our heart beats resonating to the countdown.. and literally skipping a beat during the zeroth second… But only to see our rocket taking a nosedive. Along with failure comes criticism, bunch of naysayers. What the hell is this? Bunch of kids launching Diwali Rockets? Constructive criticism is what gets us going through the most mundane of times. It motivates us to keep working on our lacunae and live up to our dreams. We always need to trust our Inner voice, and not be trapped by external noise.. dogma. It is rightly said Intuition is far more powerful than intellect. And that’s why today we have launched our Rockets to heights of 4 kms. And in doing so have been the first and only student body in India to achieve such feat. I guess Diwali Rockets don’t go at supersonic speeds.!
G stands for giving back and not getting from. We believe that giving back to the lives of others than taking more from them, is actually adding more value & purpose to our own lives. Here comes an epic tale of how VSSUT came into being. After the construction of the Hirakud dam, the world’s longest dam on the mighty Mahanadi River, there was a dire need of engineers to support, manage and operate the dam. That’s how VSSUT came into being. Having produced over 30000 par excellent engineers in over 62 batches, VSSUT attributes its glory to the Hirakud dam. We extend the idea to monitor the Hirakud Dam and Mahanadi river basin, but through a slightly out of the box approach; using a picosat carried by our own launch vehicle.
H for Hope; Quoting an excerpt from one of the greatest movies of all time.. The Shawshank Redemption. “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. It comes down to a simple choice: Get busy living, or get busy dying.” the hope drives us to conquer the impossible; the hope to solve what remains unsolved. After a series of failures, I don’t know 40-50.. I lost count, the hope to see our Rockets fly.! Team VSLV is immensely grateful to its ever-active members who keep the fire of hope burning. The hope to take VSLV to greater heights with every launch.
Innovation. When your motives are driven by desires beyond wanting fame, wanting power, money, you enter a state of achieving unparalleled status quo. That is the exact moment where breaking the stereotypes ceases to be just a phrase and you turn dreams into reality. Steve Jobs had said, being the Richest Person in the Cemetery doesn’t matter. The entire point in accumulating wealth is to realize that it’s not the point. The only way forward is to ignite ideas to innovate incessantly, to help people craft something that they could never conjure up themselves. VSLV also had to adapt to available resources, to adhere to Frugal Innovation, popularly termed as jugaad in India.
We started off as a team of 20 members with a dream to make a difference in the way the college is perceived, the way its students look at technology, the way which society perceives us engineers as innovators. The dream was simple, to develop a picosat and sounding rocket that could scale up the Hirakud Dam. But the implementation and the journey has been one in a million.
People are obsessed chasing perfection. It is an innate human feeling to be extraordinary, to pursue mastery in a certain field, but this obsession with perfection could be boiled down to obsession with progress. Time and again, we sit down the entire techno-management team to discuss the technical, financial, and social growth of the project. That’s it! We need to enjoy the journey, the moments, to celebrate and raise toast to the smallest victories. All of us are precious, amazing and unique. Given your DNA, the way you were raised, the skills you acquired, the values you learnt, you are literally never going to find that exact combination anywhere ever again! So, if you ever wanted to feel special.. there it is.. you are Special! This uniqueness of each of our members, makes us the paragon of Student Driven Space Mission in India.
In conclusion I would like to add that never shy from being different, being the outcast, having a unique perspective. We all have only one shot at life; let’s follow the path of innovation, and live it to the fullest. Let’s elevate our expertise to unscaled heights, experience to unfathomed depths and euphoric moments to enriching learning experiences. We are the biggest mystery, let’s unearth our secrets, let’s unleash our potential. Let’s be a diamond with a flaw, than a perfect pebble! Let’s prove that Even sky is not the limit !!
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