It will be an epoch-making moment on Monday, May 23, 2016, when India will test its first Made In India reusable launch vehicle. The mission which has been named hypersonic flight test experiment will last for approximately 10 minutes from liftoff to splashdown.
The success of reusable launch vehicle mission will lead to further tests, and if everything goes well, the nation will have its space shuttle ready by 2030.
Reusable space vehicles will go a long way in reducing the cost of carrying hardware to space by more than ten times. Advanced versions of the vehicle will be used in manned missions to outer space.
It will be a major step in the development of fully reusable launch vehicle. The sleek delta winged prototype will have its first test flight on Monday.The Reusable Launch Vehicle will be launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.
The launch vehicle with delta wings and angled tail fins will eventually fly into space, inject a satellite and then land on Earth to be re-used again. It will help to reduce the cost of launching a satellite.
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The vehicle will have a hypersonic test flight and will feature solid strap-on thruster. It will take off vertically much akin to a rocket and will reach Mach 5 or five times the speed of sound.
The vehicle will then effect an 180-degree turn in preparation for re-entry. The re-entry will have to be done at a correct angle, literally slicing through the dense atmosphere.
A steep angle and it will bounce off into space, and a shallow angle will burn up the whole vehicle. After its descent, the vehicle will have a controlled splashdown in the Bay of Bengal.
The vehicle will disintegrate during its splashdown, but this test is to validate certain data and not to recover the vehicle. The landing of the space vehicle will be done at a later stage.
