India Planning Reusable 2-Stage-to-Orbit Vehicle

WoodenKnight writes "India's ISRO Chairman, G Madhavan Nair recently gave a brief description of a fully-reusable 2-stage satellite launch vehicle that is being planned at ISRO. From the article: 'This is in its initial stages of vehicle configuration and the first stage is configured as a winged body configuration, which will attain an altitude of around 100 km and deliver nearly half the orbital velocity. This stage after burnout will re-enter and will be made to land horizontally on the runway, like an aircraft. The second stage after delivering the payload in the orbit will be made to re-enter the atmosphere and will be recovered using airbags either in the sea or land. This is only in its conceptual stage.'"

Comments

Re:You're not kidding..

[AoT]

I doubt we will see a cold war in Asia. Pakistan does not have near enough resources to compete with India, and China really is pretty indifferent to India. China is focussing on economic development and economic expansion, politacally speaking; though they are building their military, that is more in response to the US.

India just has their few nukes for deterence, and they really have pushes for a comprehensive, enforcable ban on nukes. Not that that is likely, but hey, they seem to be doing all of this in good faith.