ISRO has launched its first GSLV Mark III booster on a suborbital flight test, apparently successfully. However, details are rather sparse at this hour about how exactly how well things went. The only thing the on the ISRO website is: GSLV Mk-III X successfully launches the Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment – CARE on Dec 18, 2014 There are Twitter reports that CARE splashed down successfully. More details as they […]
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With only two weeks left in the year, the global launch schedule is crammed with 9 launches, including the flights of new launch vehicles by Russia and India and an unprecedented effort by SpaceX to recover a first-stage for reuse. Below are the highlights. Dec. 18. GSLV Mk.3: India will conduct the first test flight of its new medium-lift GSLV Mk. 3 launch vehicle. This will be a suborbital launch […]
GSLV Mk-III mock-up at the second launch pad. (Credit: ISRO)
The Indian space agency ISRO is set to conduct the first test flight of its largest ever booster, the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle Mark III, on Thursday.
If at first you don’t succeed, spend three years re-engineering and re-testing anything and everything and then try, try again.
That’s the story of ISRO’s experience with developing a cryogenic upper stage, an advanced technology mastered by only a handful of the world’s space powers. On August 19, the Indian space agency will launch its second domestically produced cryogenic stage, capping off a three-year effort to recover for its first failed attempt.
On April 15, 2010, the first and second stages of the GSLV rocket fired nominally. However, the cryogenic upper stage engine fired for only .5 seconds before the fuel pump failed. The premature cutoff sent the GSAT-4 spacecraft to a watery grave at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal.
Most rockets take about nine minutes to put their payloads into low Earth orbit, going from a dead stop on terra firma to 17,500 miles per hour.
In the case of India’s GSLV rocket, it takes several years longer. That’s the typical interval between launch attempts. You then have to add on a couple of more years to account for all of the GSLV’s launch failures. Of seven launches over nearly 12 years, India’s largest rocket has notched only two successes and one partial success. The last fully successful flight occurred in September 2004.
But, ISRO is, if nothing else,doggedly persistent. In April, the Indian space agency will attempt to launch a GSLV rocket fitted with its second domestically produced cryogenic upper stage. The launch will take place exactly three years after the turbo pump on the first homemade cryogenic engine malfunctioned, sending the GSAT-4 communications satellite into the Bay of Bengal. That failure came after 17 years of work on cryogenic technology.
ISRO officials are planning to commercialize parts of its space program and add a new launchpad as the space agency prepares for its 100th mission next week.
India’s workhorse rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which has completed 20 consecutively successful launches under the eagle eye of ISRO, is one such technology that the agency is hoping to hive off to private players. Today, about 80% of the vehicle is put together with parts supplied by the private industry. If K Radhakrishnan, the current chairman of ISRO and a manager trained at the Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore has his way, then the entire vehicle itself could well be made and launched by private players.
By Douglas Messier
Parabolic Arc Managing Editor
While the Chinese celebrate the launch of a three-member crew to the Tiangong-1 space station, two former chairman of India’s space agency ISRO are looking on with both admiration and regret. As China’s program has moved slowly but steadily forward, India’s plans for human space missions have slipped from around 2016 into the early to mid-2020s.
India’s top space scientists praised China’s maiden mission of manned docking of its space lab even as New Delhi’s own human space flight programme seems to have lost momentum.
“It’s a wonderful thing that has happened,” ex-Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, U R Rao told PTI here. “Essentially, they are making sure that they are going ahead systematically with manned mission programme”. …
He said India has not started any manned mission programme at all. “We have to have much larger and much more powerful launch vehicle,” Rao said.
By Douglas Messier
Parabolic Arc Managing Editor
As was announced late last year, the Indian space agency isn’t going to send astronauts into orbit on its own anytime soon. However, ISRO will send an orbiter to Mars next year, which would be the nation’s first interplanetary probe and only the second time it has sent a spacecraft beyond Earth orbit. Meanwhile, the Chandrayaan-II mission continues to slip into the future as ISRO gears up for several advanced rocket tests.