Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Flashcards
NEWS
Recently, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and its partners successfully demonstrated a precise landing experiment for a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) at the Aeronautical Test Range (ATR), Chitradurga, Karnataka.
An Indian Air Forces (IAF) Chinook helicopter was used to drop the RLV-TD from a 4.5 km altitude and ISRO executed the landing experiment of the RLV-TD as planned.
What is ISRO’s RLV Project?
According to ISRO, the series of experiments with the winged Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstration (RLV-TD) are part of efforts at “developing essential technologies for a fully reusable launch vehicle to enable low-cost access to space”.
In the future, this vehicle will be scaled up to become the first stage of India’s reusable two-stage orbital (TSTO) launch vehicle.
Features and Application:
ISRO’s RLV-TD looks like an aircraft. It consists of a fuselage, a nose cap, double delta wings, and twin vertical tails.
The RLV-TD will be used to develop technologies like hypersonic flight (HEX), autonomous landing (LEX), return flight experiment (REX), powered cruise flight, and Scramjet Propulsion Experiment (SPEX).
Significance:
With the costs acting as a major deterrent to space exploration, a reusable launch vehicle is considered a low-cost, reliable, and on-demand mode of accessing space.
By using RLVs the cost of a launch can be reduced by nearly 80% of the present cost.
Other Previous Experiment:
ISRO had earlier demonstrated the re-entry of its winged vehicle RLV-TD in the HEX mission in May 2016.
In HEX, the vehicle landed on a hypothetical runway over the Bay of Bengal. Precise landing on a runway was an aspect not included in the HEX mission.
The LEX mission achieved the final approach phase that coincided with the re-entry return flight path exhibiting an autonomous, high speed (350 kmph) landing.
Other Agencies Using RLV or Partial RLV:
Reusable space vehicles have been in existence for a long time with NASA space shuttles carrying out dozens of human space flight missions.
SpaceX has been demonstrating partially reusable launch systems with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets since 2017.
SpaceX is also working on a fully reusable launch vehicle system called Starship.
