The Hindu Business Line : Satellite launcher is now fully made in India

The Indian GSLV satellite launcher is now fully indigenous. The home-made cryogenic upper stage to power it has ‘arrived’, albeit some ten years later than it could have.

ISRO on Thursday evening completed the last crucial ground test for a full-flight duration of 720 seconds at the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, Mahendragiri. This puts the country in an upper-crust ‘cryo club’ comprising the US, Russia, Europe and Japan.

The cryo upper stage (CUS) has been developed over ten years at a cost of nearly Rs 450 crore. It will go into the GSLV rockets that are meant to lift two-tonne-plus loads to a distance of 36,000 km in space. ISRO said the crucial milestone validates its design robustness and performance adequacy for use in the GSLV.

Ground tests

The latest success was the climax of challenging ground tests done under severe conditions – for 50 seconds in December 2006 and 480 seconds in August 2007, the ISRO Chairman, Mr G. Madhavan Nair, told Business Line. “We are jubilant. We could achieve more (than what some other agencies could). The GSLV is now 100 per cent indigenous and we don’t any more have to use the Russian stages,” he said from Thiruvananthapuram.

With ground tests cleared, the CUS will get real in 2008 when the GSLV-D3 launches the experimental Gsat-4, said Mr P.S. Sastry, Director, ISRO Launch Vehicle Programme Office. It would power the upper stage of all future GSLVs, he said.

VENDOR DEALS

The CUS also increases ISRO’s outsourcing to industry: over 100 private and public sector companies were involved, Mr Nair said. The sophisticated materials came from Mishra Dhatu Nigam; the tank structures from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd; engines from Godrej MTAR; and liquid propellants from Andhra Sugars; and smaller components and services from others such as Keltec and Lakshmi Machine Tools.

Mr Nair said ISRO had signed three-year contracts with its vendors for the next five GSLV launches. A five-year sourcing plan was being prepared. The agency plans to have at least two GSLV and 3-4 PSLV launches a year, he said.

In the next two years, the upper stage could be fine tuned to increase the GSLV’s lifting capability to 2.5 kg.

While cost of building an indigenous GSLV launcher – at Rs 170 crore a piece – was only 70-80 per cent of the international cost, the indigenous CUS would not make much difference to a commercial bill, Mr Nair said.

HARD LESSONS

A cryo stage is far more efficient than liquid or solid propellant stages. The CUS programme took off after the US torpedoed an Indo-Russian cryogenic technology transfer plan in the 1990s.The national space programme cannot import it as the Missile Technology Control Regime prohibits this.

According to ISRO spokesman, Mr S. Satish, the arduous CUS journey involved doing many things from scratch: building a test facility; learning to handle liquid hydrogen, oxygen and materials at low temperatures; developing special aluminium and other alloys that do not get brittle at minus 200 degrees Celsius; fabrication of high-rpm pumps, among others.

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