ISRO Launches Swadeshi Made Reusable Launch Vehicle

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched indigenously made Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) on Monday from Sri Harikota Satish spaceport in Andhra Pradesh. The RLV is aimed at putting satellites into orbit around earth and then re-enter the atmosphere. RLV will be carried up on a solid rocket motor. The nine-metre-long RLV rocket weighs 11 tonnes.

“We have successfully accomplished the RLV-TD mission. The lift-off was at 7.00 a.m. from the first launch pad here,” said SRO director Devi Prasad Karnik.

The vehicle will be taken to a height of over 70 km and released for its re-entry into the atmosphere. After launch it will be glided back onto a virtual runway in the Bay of Bengal, some 500 km from the coast. The RLV-TD is described as a very preliminary step in the development of a reusable rocket, whose final version is expected to take 10-15 years.

Launch of India's first indigenous space shuttle RLV-TD is the result of the industrious efforts of our scientists. Congrats to them.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) 23 May 2016

The space agency said, The double delta-winged RLV-TD is a experimented version of a scale model which is almost 6 times smaller than the final version, but looks similar to the US space shuttle in its appearance. The 6.5m long RLV is an ‘aeroplane’ like structure.  RLV-TD is a series of technology demonstration missions that have been considered as a first step towards realising a Two Stage To Orbit (TSTO) fully re-usable vehicle. 

The mission, known as the hypersonic flight experiment, is expected to last about 10 minutes from liftoff to splashdown. The RLV-TD which is the scaled-down model of the reusable launch vehicle is unlikely to be recovered from sea during this experiment as it is expected that the vehicle will disintegrate on impact with water since it is not designed to float.

Reusable launch vehicle is the unanimous solution to achieve low cost, reliable and on-demand space access, according to ISRO scientists. The government has invested Rs 95 crore into the RLV-TD project.