Just 20 minutes after liftoff, ISRO declared, “Mission accomplished”.
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India on Monday launched a scale model of a reusable space shuttle using a rocket that will, in its final avatar, launch satellites at a fraction of the current cost.
“In subsequent test flights, we will attempt to land the reusable vehicle at a specific location on land like an aircraft does on a runway so that we can again use it for launching more satellites”, said ISRO director K. Sivan.
Costing around $14 million, the RLV-TD took more than a decade to develop.
The RLV-TD flown Monday will not be recovered from the sea, but the 1.75-ton vehicle will undergo successive test flights during the coming years to demonstrate landing capability.
The mission is the first of four phases of a technology demonstration project, or RLV-TD, at the end of which India hopes to have a viable space shuttle programme. “The lift-off was at 7.00 a.m. from the first launch pad here”. Describing the launch of RLV as a small step in achieving the objective of reducing the cost of space transportation, top space scientist G Madhavan Nair said it may take ten years for the country to put in place such an operational rocket.
The indigenously devised shuttle has caught people’s attention as its capable of diminishing costs of launching rockets by almost 10 times.
The BBC reports India’s space agency has successfully launched a reusable, prototype shuttle into space.
After the launch, the space shuttle flew to an altitude of 70 kilometreskm and then engaged in a free-gliding flight that started with an initial velocity five times that of sound.
No other country is now operationally flying a winged spacecraft into space – the USA retired its space shuttles in 2011 and the Russians flew theirs only once in 1989.
“I offer my congratulations to the Scientists, Engineers and Technicians of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for the successful test of the RLV-TD”, the Vice President said in a statement.
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India has launched an unmanned model space shuttle into orbit, joining the race for re-useable spacecraft.
