The book is revelatory on many counts. For instance, very little was known about help from foreign space agencies like NASA in the initial years, except that the Nike Apache rockets launched from ThuMBA came from the American space agency. While there was no formal transfer of knowhow for design, engineering, telemetry and propellant making, information flowed through personal visits, training and equipment which was loaned or gifted. Aravamudan’s training started with a visit to some facilities of NASA, along with three other young engineers. Kalam later joined the group. The group of young recruits participated in fabrication and testing of radar and telemetry ground station, which was later shipped to Thumba. Since Thumba was declared as a UN facility for sounding rocket experiments, it attracted scientists from space agencies from the USSR, France, Germany, Japan and so on. Knowing well that he was entering an area of endeavour in which India had little expertise, Sarabhai made aggressive attempts to attract talented Indians from America and elsewhere. Advertisements were placed in foreign newspapers and journals for NRI engineers and scientists. The first lot, at the Physical Research Laboratory (the cradle of the space programme) in the 1950s, all came from America—E.V. Chitnis, P.D. Bhavsar, S.R. Thakore, Vasant Gowarikar, Muthunayagam and others. After ISRO became a separate entity in 1969, Sarabhai dispatched Aravamudan, Ramakrishna Rao and Y.J. Rao on a world tour of all major space agencies. By now, the space programme had moved from sounding rockets to the next stage—planning for launch vehicles and satellites as well as a launching station at Sriharikota. The book has detailed the experience of this familiarisation trip, which covered major facilities of NASA, the European Space Agency and aerospace companies like Rolls Royce: “It all looked almost like science fiction to us then. We never imagined we would ever have anything like that in India.”