India Targets July/August To Test Its Space Shuttle

New submitter gubol123 writes with news that India is close to launching its own space shuttle for the first time. Their space program, ISRO, is planning the shuttle's first test flight for some time in July or August. The unmanned shuttle will fly to a height of approximately 70 kilometers before splashing down in the Bay of Bengal. Oddly, the vehicle itself probably won't be recovered. When it lands in the water, it will sink, and there are no plans to try to bring it back to the surface. The most important obstacles are surviving re-entry and simply staying intact during splashdown. Scientists and ISRO engineers are hoping the shuttle program, when finished, will drop the cost of placing objects in orbit by a factor of 10.

Comments

ISRO sponsered by BIC

[Anonymous Coward]

The unmanned shuttle will fly to a height of approximately 70 kilometers before splashing down in the Bay of Bengal. Oddly, the vehicle itself probably won't be recovered.

How can it be called a Shuttle if it's only going to be used once?

Re:ISRO sponsered by BIC

[Somebody Is Using My]

The unmanned shuttle will fly to a height of approximately 70 kilometers before splashing down in the Bay of Bengal. Oddly, the vehicle itself probably won't be recovered.

How can it be called a Shuttle if it's only going to be used once?

And while we are at it, since the beginning of "space" is generally accepted to be 100KM and this thing is only going up 70KM, the "space" part of its name is inaccurate too.

But I guess "space shuttle" sounds better than "big can we're chucking high up into the air and then letting sink into the ocean".

Craft recovery?

[thegameiam]

I'm very surprised that they wouldn't be at least planning to recover the craft - that would give them all sorts of validation about the actual impact (heh) of launch and re-entry, and could help them get to the next iteration faster. I assume they know what they're doing, but TFA didn't include anything approaching a reason for not attempting recovery.

Factor of 10

[ckhorne]

The original US Space Shuttle was also designed to reduce costs - It was hoped that it would be able to run 50 missions / yr (one per week!) and cost $50million/mission (in 2011 dollars). Instead, reality set in, and by the end, it was running only a few missions per year at a cost of around 1/2 Billion dollars each.

The Space Shuttle, while a novel idea, simply wasn't the best design for getting into space - it introducing too many safety compromises. Granted, technology has vastly improved since the 1970's, when the Space Shuttle was designed, but that's mostly in the area of computing - material science hasn't changed nearly as much.

I truly hope India does well with their program, but I do wonder if they're ignoring the mistakes made by the US when we went down this road.

Also... 70km... They do realize this isn't planet Kerbin, right?

Re:Factor of 10

[ihtoit]

The Rise and Fall of the Space Shuttle, Book Review: Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins, American Scientist, 2008, Vol. 96, No. 5, p. 32, estimates the average STS mission cost at $1.5Bn in adjusted USD.

and Kerbin: funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing! The ISS suffers from atmospheric drag even at 250 miles up. KSP cutoff is shy of 70km, re-entry drag doesn't kick in until you hit 30km. I'd install a real atmosphere mod but I don't have 32GB RAM or a 5GHz processor.