India plans to design Reusable Rocket For Global Market To Cut Cost of Launches: ISRO
New Delhi: In the middle of the high price of launching rockets into space, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) – S Somanath said, “India plans to design and build a new reusable rocket for the global market because this would significantly reduce the cost of launching satellites. This is the idea India is working on, and it cannot be ISRO’s idea alone, but has to be an industry’s idea. Therefore, ISRO will have to work with the industry to design, engineer, manufacture, and launch a new reusable rocket as a commercial product, and operate it commercially,”
S Somanath said this at the seventh ‘Bengaluru Space Expo 2022’. he said, “The Indian space agency has been working on various technologies, including the one demonstrated with Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (IAD) last week. The ISRO Chief explained that India will need to have a retro propulsion system to land the rocket back on Earth.
IAD is a game-changer with multiple applications for future space applications such as the recovery of the spent stages of a rocket, building space habitat during future human spaceflight missions, and landing payloads on Venus or Mars. On September 3, 2022, the ISRO successfully tested an IAD designed and developed by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Kerala. The IAD was launched atop a Rohini-sounding rocket from Thumba, ISRO Chief said.
Retropropulsion is a technique to safely decelerate a space probe during re-entry into a planet’s atmosphere.
The goal of ISRO is to combine these technologies to design and build a new reusable rocket. The rocket will be launched in partnership with industry, startups, and the Indian space agency’s commercial arm, New Space India Limited (NSIL).
About the price of launching, he said, “At present, it takes about USD 10,000 to USD 15,000 (INR 7,98,000 to INR 11,97,000) to put a kilogram of payload into orbit. All of us want launches to be much cheaper than what we do today.”
The ISRO Chief further added that “the cost needs to be brought down to USD 5,000 (INR 3,99,000) or even USD 1,000 (INR 79,800) per kilogram and that the only way to do that is to make the rocket reusable. Currently, in India, there is no reusable technology yet in launch vehicles or rockets. The idea is that the next rocket India is going to build after GSLV Mk III should be reusable.”
Somanath said the rocket will be built in India but operated globally for the services of the space sector. He added that this should happen in the next few years so that ISRO can retire all the operating launch vehicles in India at an appropriate time.
(Vinayak)
