'Fat boy' flies: ISRO's heavy rocket fails to blow up India has successfully launched its GSLV Mark III heavy-lift rocket on schedule, leaving explosion-watchers disappointed. As we reported last week, the launcher represents India's entry into heavy rocketry: its GSLV Mark III is currently able to hoist four tonnes to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, or eight tonnes to low earth …
It's all relative... ;-)
But that India is now available as an alternative to the NASA/Roscosmos/ESA/SpaceX group (Blue Origin and Orbital Sciences aren't included because they haven't lifted commercial satellites yet) is exciting and could get even more interesting in the future.
Give the Indians time... now that the Mark III has flown, the Indians are going to build on that and deliver more.
It's all relative...
Not really. Like in many industries, there are generally accepted definitions of various terms, with some agencies (NASA, ESA) having formal definitions of the terms.
In the industry, a 476Jub (2,000kg) to 4762Jubs (20,000kg) payload to LEO (e.g. Delta II, Long March 4, Zenit, Atlas V, Falcon 9) is classified as medium-lift, with heavy-lift being 4726Jubs (20,000kg) to 11.9kJubs (50,000kg) (e.g. Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, Falcon 9 FT non-reusable).
Several things will change:
* Both the SRBs and the cryogenic upper stage overperformed, based on ISRO's statements.
* Only the 200kN cryogenic stage is completely new. The main stage is the same 2x Vikas from GSLV. The boosters are scaled up version of the first stage of PSLV.
* The Vikas engines will be replaced by ISRO's SCE2000 LOX/RP1 core engine that's in development. They project the payload improving to 6 tons to GTO / 12 tons to LEO, from the current 5 and 10.
ISRO is a very lean organization running on a $1 billion budget. As with PSLV and GSLV, they'll simply iteratively improve an initial design until it's well in excess of original stated capability.
I cannot understand why we still give India part of our foreign aid budget if they can afford to have their own space programme. Yes, some will say, there are parts of India that are poor; but there are parts of the UK that are poor too!
If India cannot afford to feed all of it's people then it should stop the space spending and divert the money..... It's all about choices.
"If India cannot afford to feed all of it's people then it should stop the space spending and divert the money..... It's all about choices."
OK so how about the UK, US, Russia, China and the rest of world stop as well? Last time I checked, we still have people living in poverty and on the streets, relying on charity handouts.
You clearly don't understand how government finances work so lets keep this simple.
Poor people without a job don't pay taxes. Poor people without a job are also unlikely to have the means of letting their childres go to a school, meaning their children wil also be poor and without a job.
Running a (relatively cheap) space program means you can get some better educated people a good job, so they can pay taxes and send their children to school, so the children will later pay taxes as well. You can then use the more reliable source of income from taxes to help the poor.
On top of that the space program is a billboard for the nation: "Hey, look at us, look what we can do. Send some of those manufacturing contracts our way maybe?" (Since being able to build a reliable rocket means you have a high degree of control/mastery of things like supply chain management, metalurgy, engineering, precision fabrication and assembly, transport, quality assurance, etc, etc). Guess what those extra contracts do? More people (including lower wage/education) with jobs, more people paying taxes, more people sending their children to school. Thus less poverty in the future.
Poverty isn't a prolem you solve by simply throwing money at it. And just because they spend 1 billion on a space program (a tad under a dollar per person) doesn't mean they don't spend anything on poverty relief/reduction. In fact they spend well over 100 billion a year on those measures. Stopping the space program would add less than 1% to that budget. Not exactly shocking.
Keep in mind also that the space program is more of an offshoot of the ballistic missile program intended to threaten and/or keep control of Pakistan. That's still a powder keg waiting to kill us all in nuclear fire. (Both sides hate each other, both sides have nukes, and there haven't been any positive moves in the conflict from either side for some time now)
Pakistan ? India's strategic nuclear program has ALWAYS focused on the People's Republic of China! We tested nuclear weapons within a decade of China, and a full quarter of a century before Pakistan. People overestimate the distance to important Pakistani targets. Many are within mere artillery reach. Most of India's ICBMs/IRBMs fired towards Pakistan will instead land in the vicinity of Turkey or Finland.
Pakistan is not a rival or even a peer to India. They are a small country of nuisance value. China is a rival.
@Raj,
I'm not saying they are a rival or peer. I'm saying the india-pakistan relations are a (nuclear) threat to the stability in the region. Current diplomatic relations with China are FAR less strained than they are with Pakistan from my understanding. I'll grant you firing an ICBM or IRBM towards Pakistan would be "a bit" overkill.
The US and USSR came far closer to nuclear war than India and Pakistan ever did. Even today, Putin and Russia are demonized by the west an order of magnitude more than any heat in the subcontinent.
It's trite nonsense that developing countries cannot establish proper protocols. What's more, China's increasing influence over a progressively deteriorating Pakistani economy ensures that they are less likely to lash out.
As for India, we're a status quo power who simply do not look at Pakistan as a peer. We stopped doing that in 1971 after we cut them in half. Until then, they were quite a large entity, surrounding us from both sides, but Indira Gandhi did generations of Indians a great favour by fixing that problem.
Today they are just a nuisance, falling further and further behind us. At one time, they were quite a bit wealthier than us on average, but are now poorer and falling further behind each passing year. Just India's federal budget alone is already quite larger than Pakistan's entire GDP, and pretty much every other metric is 10-20x larger.
"Yes, some will say, there are parts of India that are poor; but there are parts of the UK that are poor too!"
Parts of India are poor because they don't have water, electricity or basic sanitation. Parts of the UK are poor because they spend their benefits on scratchcards and booze...
It's horses for course.
If you can keep the weight below about 4 tonnes you know have the choice of what 4? 5? LV's for your comm sat.
The challenge with all ELV's f course is establishing your record of successful launches, at a minimum the 5/8 rule of the Aerospace Corporation. 5 good launches and the design is OK, beyond 8 and the mfg chain is OK as well IE it can consistently produce the same hardware that works in the same way.
This also opens the way to all Indian probes to the Moon, Mars and Venus as possibilities.
Well done all concerned.
...is because the Russians were suppose to jointly work on this project and help India expedite it's space missions. But under the pressure from the US government the Russians pulled out of the project and India had to start under heavy western sanctions. BTW, India is still under sanctions for technology related projects from the western countires.
ISRO has now built not one but two LOH/LH2 motors on its own. The CE7.5 that sits atop the GSLV is a 75kN staged combustion engine. The CE20 that sits atop this LVM3 is a 200kN gas generator based design, and currently the most powerful LOX/LH2 upper stage in operation.
Which puts it in the RL10 thrust range but with (in principal) greater scalability. A very considerable achievement. I sometimes wonder if India had worked with Reaction Engines Limited. :-( .
I do hope India will be looking at the work ULA have been doing with the "Integrated Vehicle Fluids" concept. This can cut weight a lot and deliver (in principal) unlimited restarts, as well as reducing boil off by a lot.
Very handy for longer duration missions where you want to fire the stage further away from Earth to reshape a probe or orbiters trajectory after a coast period.
The CE7.5 is a restartable engine.
ISRO is moving to a United Launch Vehicles paradigm, with a TSTO approach using LOX/RP1 plus SRBs for the first stage and LOX/LH2 upper stage. With multiple scalable SRBs and upper stages, they can eliminate the 4-stage PSLV and 3-stage GSLV designs, which both have design tradeoffs they have to stomach.
It's not really a 'mistake' they made as such - they're a very small organization with a tiny budget simply reusing technology as much as they could. They have certain core competencies - great SRBs, a reliable (but hypergolic) liquid engine, and now two good LOX/LH2 motors. For example, the LVM3 has two expanded PSLV first stages as the SRBs, and the GSLV Vikas motor as the main motor.
ISRO doesn't want to play with UDMH/N2O2 any longer. They're instead building the SCE2000 LOX/RP1 motor, which will give them the added benefit of scaling up LVM3 payload to 6+ tons to GTO from the current 5ish.
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