Indian Lift-off a Let Down

[sheeny (Al)]

Got this from this morning's news@nature.

Al.

Indian lift-off a let-down

Officials insist the country's space ambitions remain undaunted.
Killugudi Jayaraman

An Indian-made rocket carrying the country's latest telecom satellite, Insat-4C, went up in smoke on launch yesterday, raining debris into the Bay of Bengal.

But officials insist that the failure won't seriously affect India's space ambitions. The country has a series of contracts for commercial launches of satellites, including ones from Italy and Indonesia, that will take place as scheduled later this year. And India's ambitious Moon mission, slated for an early 2008 launch, relies on a different launch system so shouldn't be delayed or affected by the satellite incident.

The planned launch of an Israeli telescope by India in early 2007 might, however, be delayed.

The accident is the second setback to hit the Indian science community this week. On 9 July, India's intermediate-range ballistic missile Agni-III also failed in its first test-launch.

Out of control

The satellite launch mishap, which followed 12 successful missions by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), took place 60 seconds after lift-off. ISRO scientists had to destroy the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) when it began to careen from its intended trajectory.

In a televised interview, ISRO chairman Gopalan Madhavan Nair said the vehicle lost control after one of four strap-on boosters failed to develop thrust. "Even the US space shuttle had failures," he said. "We will find out the reason for the GSLV failure and solve it." Nair denied there was any basic design flaw.

The upcoming Moon mission, which will also carry scientific payloads from the United States and Europe, is still on track, as it will use a different rocket, called the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). This is ISRO's proven workhorse.

ISRO's contracted launches of commercial payloads will also use the PSLV, except for one launch of the Israeli space telescope TAUVEX. That will have to wait until an investigation committee determines the cause of yesterday's crash and decides how long the GSLV should stay grounded.

The ill-fated GSLV was on its second operational flight. Its payload should have added to a series of seven Insat communications satellites, intended to increase India's television broadcasting capacity by 50%. This was the first Insat satellite to be launched from India by India.

ISRO said it spent Rs1.5 billion (US$30 million) on the rocket and another Rs0.96 billion on the satellite.

[iceman (Mike)]

US$30m up in smoke! Ouch.

Great to see some other players trying to get into the space race.

[sheeny (Al)]

Yeah, that's some serious fireworks isn't it?

Al.

[Gargoyle_Steve (Steve)]

Some yeas ago, when Optus had it's first comms satellites ready for launch I was talking to an Optus engineer (I was with Telstra at the time) about the costs of such activities. He told me that a big part of the cost was insuring it - and that satellite insurance was basically equal to one third of the production/launch cost total. Reason being according to him that roughly 1 in 3 satellites launched by "cheaper carriers" if I can use that phrase either blow up, crash, etc - his words, not mine.

Interesting development: some of you may remember that after the launch of the 2nd (I think it was the "B" satellite) Optus comms sat prior to the launch vehicle achieving orbit it simply disappeared off radar, reason unknown & unproven - until they found some fuel tank remains floating in the ocean some time later, ID numbers proved them to be from the same vehicle.

This guy was right - one in 3 crashed!