India’s first indigenous space shuttle RLV-TD was successfully launched this morning.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday congratulated the scientists for successfully launching India’s maiden winged reusable launch vehicle (RLV) as a technology demonstrator. “Launch of India’s first indigenous space shuttle RLV-TD is the result of the industrious efforts of our scientists. Congrats to them,” Modi said in a tweet. “The dynamism and dedication with which our scientists and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) have worked over the years is exceptional and very inspiring,” he said.
“We have successfully accomplished the RLV-TD mission. The lift-off was at 7.00 a.m. from the first launch pad here,” ISRO director Devi Prasad Karnik told IANS after the shuttle returned to the Earth.
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) May 23, 2016
The 1.7-tonne RLV was launched from ISRO’s spaceport here in Andhra Pradesh, about 80 km northeast of Chennai off the Bay of Bengal coast.The mission has qualified India to enter the elite club of space-faring nations like the US, Russia and Japan, which developed and used RLVs for their space missions over the years. A seven-metre rocket with a booster, weighing 17 tonnes, including nine tonnes of solid propellants (fuel) with the aircraft-shaped RLV was used as a flying test bed to evaluate technologies the space agency developed to reduce the cost of launching satellites into the Earth’s polar and geo-stationary orbits.
Source: bgr.in
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