After making global headlines in 2013, when the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched an unmanned mission to orbit Mars at $73 million, half the cost of NASA’s $671 million Maven Mars mission, It has successfully test launched the first ‘Made in India’ space shuttle — called the Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) — early on Monday morning from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
The final version of RLV-TD is expected to get ready in 10 to 15 years. This ISRO’s first winged flight vehicle that came back and landed on a virtual in the Bay of Bengal, 500 km from the coast.
The test launch is considered important because, in 2011, the U.S.’s NASA abandoned its reusable space shuttle project. The RLV-TD is a toned-down model of the reusable launch vehicle. If reusable rockets become a reality, the cost of access to space may come down by 10 times.
The government has invested Rs 95 crores in the RLV-TD project. The model is 6.5 metres long and weighs 1.75 ton (RLV-TD). It took place at 7 am on Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
“Mission accomplished successfully,” ISRO said after the launch.
ISRO chairman Kiran Kumar explained that the experimental RLV it is essentially an attempt by India to bring down the cost of making infrastructure for space.
Kumar said, “The RLV is a mechanism for us to bring down the cost of launch. We intend to go through a series of technology demonstration exercises, the first one of which we call HEX-01, that is a hypersonic experiment. It is called a winged body.”
“Therefore, we are designing for the first time a winged body, which will come back from space. It will be carried up on a solid rocket motor. In addition, this is the first of a series of experiments and we still have a long way to go till we reach the actual RLV, which will give us a tremendous capacity in terms of launching at a very low cost,” he added.
Others who have earlier successfully undertaken the test launches are the billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. SpaceX tested its powerful Falcon 9 rocket in December while Blue Origin’s New Shepard successfully completed a third launch and vertical landing in April this year.
Reportedly, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency are also developing a similar technology and are in testing stages.
