India Rolls Its Own Space Tech

BANGALORE, India -- India hasn't put men in orbit, sent remote-control rovers across Mars, or shot probes beyond the edge of our galaxy. But for the last five decades, it has been quietly making advances to keep it a player thousands of miles from Earth.

The Indian Space Research Organization doesn't need to look outside the borders of its own country to find technological innovators. The program today is an entirely ground-up operation that designs and launches its own satellites and research vehicles into space. Here is a list of some of the more promising programs sponsored by ISRO.

Shooting the Moon: Some time in early 2008, ISRO plans to launch the Chandryaan-1, an orbital space satellite designed to map the surface of the moon. Since NASA proposed a new initiative to use the moon as a starting point for an eventual manned mission to Mars, India has stepped forward to help out. Chandrayaan-1 will begin a two-year mission where it will aim to send back millions of high-quality images for scientists around the globe to ponder. Just 100 kilometers above endless miles of dusty planes, Chandryaan will drop a miniature probe to test future technology that could one day be the proposed basis for a lunar landing where the ISRO could use its own robotic rovers. Scientists from the European Union, United States and Bulgaria have all contributed instruments to the mission.

SCRAMJET: When you absolutely, positively have to get a jet to move at 25 times the speed of sound, the only practical option is to construct an engine that uses atmospheric air to fuel combustion. To reach those speeds it's just not practical to carry along your own oxygen like most rocket engines do. The trick seems to be finding a balance between drag and thrust -- otherwise the engines won't fire up, or worse, they could break apart. Eleven countries have ongoing hypersonic programs, but no one has yet been able to announce anything much better than a short flight. Seeing the SCRAMJET, or Supersonic Combustion Ramjet, as an integral part of developing a reusable launch vehicle, ISRO is working on developing its own Re-entry Launch Vehicle and recently tested an engine on the ground that fired at Mach 6 for seven seconds. Unlike the space shuttle, the RLV won't thrust itself into orbit, but only briefly exit the Earth's atmosphere, deposit a satellite into orbit and then come back down to the space center. Once perfected, the RLV could eliminate the need for disposable jet stages and significantly cut launch costs.

Rocket science: Sending delicate objects made out of metal and glass into space without breaking them into a million pieces or dropping them into a nearby ocean is not something to be taken lightly. India has successfully put 44 satellites into orbit. Until a recent failure in which the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle, a disposable three-stage cryogenic rocket designed for launching communications satellites, exploded a minute after takeoff, ISRO had an impressive string of successful launches. A second disposable rocket that positions reconaissance satellites into polar orbits, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle has only had one failure in eight launches and will launch the Chandryaan probe next year. In the coming two years India will complete research on a new launch craft, the GSLV-III, that will be able to handle large satellites weighing up to 6 tons into space.