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Successful GSLV launch on Sunday, important for ISRO
Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are never short of confidence. ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan was oozing confidence before the Mars launch in November.
He is similarly upbeat now, one day before the launch of the Geostationary Launch Vehicle (GSLV) D5 — a rocket that launches a satellite at an altitude of 36,000 km — on Sunday. "We were confident in 2010 as well," says Radhakrishnan, immediately putting things in perspective.
ISRO had two GSLV launches in 2010, and both were unsuccessful. The first one failed in April, milliseconds after the final cryogenic stage ignited. The second flight, in December, had to be destroyed just under a minute after lift-off as the flight path had deviated from predictions.
In August 2013, the flight had to be aborted an hour before lift-off, as the fuel tank developed a leak. This Sunday's vehicle, named GSLV-D5, will put a satellite, called GSAT-14, into a geostationary orbit.
The rocket costs Rs 173 crore and the satellite Rs 45 crore. The GSLV will use an indigenous cryogenic engine in the third stage. India's cryogenic engine, under development from early 1990s, has not had a full successful flight so far.
ISRO has spent considerable time in the last few years analysing the GSLV rocket and its failures. In 2010, an external committee headed by former chairman Madhavan Nair had looked into the matter first, and then an internal committee headed by SC Gupta, a former member of the Space Commission. Last year, another expert committee had cleared the GSLV for launch. It consisted of ISRO directors and aerospace professors from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the IITs. Since then, the GSLV has gone through several modifications.
