India’s first indigenous RLV-TD space shuttle successfully launched

Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : A senior official said that India on Monday successfully tested home-grown winged reusable launch vehicle (RLV) as a mini-shuttle and demonstrated its space technology prowess from Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh .

“We have successfully accomplished the RLV mission as a technology demonstrator. The lift-off was at 7.00 a.m. from the first launch pad here,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) director Devi Prasad Karnik told IANS.

The mini-shuttle returned and plunged into the Bay of Bengal, about 500 km away from the coast, after a 10-minute flight at about 70 km above the Earth.

The nine-metre long rocket weighs 11 tonnes.

The mission has qualified India to enter the elite club of space-faring nations like the US, Russia and Japan, which developed and used RLVs for their space missions over the years.

A seven-metre rocket with a booster, weighing 17 tonnes, including nine tonnes of solid propellants (fuel) with the aircraft-shaped RLV was used as a flying test bed to evaluate technologies the space agency developed to reduce the cost of launching satellites into the Earth’s polar and geo-stationary orbits.

The mission has enabled ISRO to collect data on hypersonic speed, autonomous landing and powered cruise flight using air-breathing propulsion.

Space agencies spend on average $20,000 per kg to build and use medium-to-heavy weight rockets to launch satellites into the Earth’s orbits.

The space agency’s telemetry, tracking and command network (Istrac) in Bangalore will collect the data from the vehicle.