Launch News A taste of fire for the Himalayian Titan: GSLV-III test flight, December 18, 2014

Cosmic Penguin

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While being one of the largest "independent" states in the spaceflight arena, there are two things still missing from the list of things that India, one of the stranger players in this field, still needs to be done before they can leap into the "Big X" category.

The much more needed one is the capability to launch their own communication satellites. Unfortunately the current rockets in the fleet of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the PSLV and GSLV rockets, aren't even good enough for most of their self-built communication satellites! (the notorious GSLV can only do just over 2 tonnes to GTO, which is good enough in the 1980s - better than today's ULA Delta II and the early Ariane rockets - but simply not enough in 2014; the PSLV is even less given its original purpose of using it on polar orbit launches) Many of India's main satellites, even those being in the 3-tonne class, have to be launched elsewhere (and due to early history, the choice has always been on Ariane rockets, the latest case being 12 days ago).

So here it is - India's largest rocket ever, the GSLV Mark III, is now ready for its first test flight! GSLV-III will finally provide India with a good "EELV-Medium" class rocket (more than 4 tonnes to geostationary transfer orbit and about 10 tonnes to Low Earth orbit) that it can use for various missions from comsats to planetary probes to even human spaceflight missions.

The GSLV-III (which should not be confused with the completely different design of the original GSLV Mark I/II) reminds many people of the good old American Titan III rocket. Indeed, the lower stages of it - our main focus of today - looks pretty close too. Flanking both sides of the rocket are 2 big solid rocket boosters - in fact only smaller than the SLS and Ariane 5 SRBs - that each provides more than 5 million Newtons force of thrust to propel the rocket up for the first 2 minutes.

The core stage, like the one on the Titan III/IV, doesn't ignite until just before SRB separation. And just like the one on the Titan, it uses hydrazine propellant for its 3+ minute burn. On the GSLV-III, 2 Vikas engines - a license built Viking engine for the tried-and-true Ariane 1-4 series that has seen continuous use in India on the PSLV's 2nd stage and GSLV's boosters and 2nd stage - will be used for the job.

What makes the GSLV-III different is the upper stage - a liquid hydrogen powered stage that uses a new in development engine named the CE-20. Unlike the smaller engine derived from Russian designs on the original GSLV, this one uses back the simpler gas generator cycle and is the key to the performance of the GSLV-III. However....it is not yet completed! Due to the sheer difficulty in handling liquid hydrogen, such engines are not easy to develop at all, and India certainly does not violate such rules, with this engine at least 2 years away from being able to fly.

Therefore today's flight is not heading to orbit at all! While a flight rated second stage will be used, the engine attached on the bottom is a dummy article. Still, this test flight will certify all the other systems and the lower stages of the rocket, ahead of its crucial flight in 2016-2017.

But what to do with the payload section then? Filling it with dummy weight may be a good idea.....

....but the Indians decide to couple it with the other big thing they want to do - to put a prototype of their human spacecraft on top of it and fly it back to Earth!

Many of you probably knows that India has always try to establish their own HSF program, even to the step of buying a dedicated Soyuz flight to train their own astronauts (this deal seems to be off nowadays). And developing their own spacecraft has been a holy grail of sorts for the last 10 years. While such a project is still not completely approved (I mean, where it can go? They doesn't seems to be eager to join the ISS project.... :shifty:), today's flight is a step closer to the goal. A prototype of the crew module named the Crew Module Atmospheric Reentry Experiment (CARE) will be flown to a maximum height of 126 km and reaches 5.3 km/s and pass back into Earth's atmosphere, deploy its parachutes and splash down in the Bay of Bengal 20 minutes after liftoff. Flying in a trajectory similar to ESA's Advanced Return Vehicle (ARV) flew on the 3rd Ariane 5 in 1998, it will prove the re-entry control, heat shield and parachute systems for such a large capsule before Indian engineers would like to freeze their human spacecraft design.

The flight starts in 25 minutes from now at 04:00 UTC. Good luck! :hailprobe:

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Cosmic Penguin

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Good flight for the rocket! CARE now on free flight falling back to Earth.
 

Cosmic Penguin

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And CARE is back on Earth! Not that it should be a difficult flight, but more data is always good. :thumbup:
 

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I very much hope that India will succeed in this test.
 

boogabooga

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It's been a good year for flight testing new space hardware.
 

Eraser

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I very much hope that India will succeed in this test.
Yeah, it was morning, I was somewhat sleepy. :facepalm: Congratulations ISRO for successful launch and landing!:cheers:
 
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