INDIA: Space Scientists Unruffled by Costly Failures

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

R. Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, Oct 14 1997 (IPS) - India’s space programme, ambitious for a developing country, took a double-jolt this month as failures knocked out a communication satellite and winged a remote-sensing bird.

At stake is India’s bid to become a player in the global business of making and launching satellites as well as hiring out transponders and selling remote-sensed imagery.

India already has a foot in the door of the space industry with transponder leases to the International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (Intelsat) worth 11 million dollars annually and contracts for imagery with the U.S. firm SI-EOSAT.

The rapidly growing Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) also has contracts to build a micro-satellite next year on the indigenously developed Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).

Although the fourth launch of the PSLV, on Sep. 29, failed to inject the IRS-1D remote sensing satellite into the desired 820 kms orbit and impart it the right speed, ISRO scientists claim success for the mission.

“There has been no setback to the mission. The launch has demonstrated India’s capability of putting a 1,000 kg class satellite into polar sun-synchronous orbit,” ISRO chairman, K. Kasturirangan, said.

By Oct. 7, ISRO scientists had used on-board thrusters to steer IRS-1D some 400 kms into “functional orbit”, and even sent surprisingly sharp pictures from its 5.8 metre resolution cameras distributed to a highly critical press.

“The manoeuvres, using the 11 Newton thrusters were very precise and not a drop of propellant was wasted. The satellite will be functional for its designed three years,” ISRO spokesman S. Krishnamurthy said.

According to Krishnamurthy, the manoeuvres also proved ISRO’s strengths in ground control, from its Master Control Facility set up at Hassan, outside Bangalore city.

ISRO officials are yet to pass verdict on why the PSLV strayed but say a valve failure in the propellant tank of the last and fourth stage could have been the likely cause.

But the real tragedy for ISRO, this month was the loss of the 148 million dollar, INSAT-2D, the fourth in a series of indigenously fabricated communication satellites, abandoned after it lost its “earth-lock” and was pointing the wrong way.

The failure of INSAT-2D just four months after the launch resulted in an unseemly scramble to switch by major users such as the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Department of Telecommunications to transponders on three earlier satellites in the INSAT-2 series.

The NSE which has 1,600 very small aperture terminals (VSATs) lost several days of trading resulting in huge losses which are yet to be estimated said its deputy chief Ravi Narayan.

Smaller users such as the fledgeling VSAT provider industry suffered setbacks to their plans and are now clamouring for a change in laws which forbid all uplinking to transponders on foreign satellites.

When INSAT-2E, fifth and last in the series, is launched in June next year it is scheduled to mitigate those setbacks although VSAT providers worry that 11 of its 28 transponders have already been booked by Intelsat in a 10-year, 100-million dollar deal with ISRO.

“Satellite failures happen to other countries but do not result in catastrophes for users because they have the freedom to hire internationally available transponders on a market basis,” says Dr N. Seshagiri, director-general of the National Informatics Centre and special secretary to the government.

Officials admit a setback in plans to have a total of 100 working transponders in space by the year 2002 and also a possible rethink on a new and expansive satellite communciation policy prompted by government monopoly on transponder use.

Already approved, but awaiting final clearance, the new policy would have allowed greater private participation in satellite communications and operation of transponders on foreign satellites from Indian soil.

Even the Department of Telecommunications and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, partners of the INSAT programme, may now lease transponders from other space organisations to meet expansion schedules, hit by the failure of INSAT-2D.

But INSAT programme director, Dr K. Narayanan, said ISRO would

cope once the advanced INSAT-3 series, a new feature-rich generation of communication satellites are launched from 1999 onwards.

The new satellites would carry hubs developed by ISRO which would improve mobile telephone by providing an alternative to low orbit satellites that depend on ground-based hubs, according to K.N. Sankaran, ISRO’s deputy director of electronics.

While the first two of the INSAT-3 series will ride on foreign rockets, the rest are planned to be launched from India’s newly developed Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicles (GSLV).

Already operational, the GSLV programme has survived U.S embargoes on export of strategic material to India and features a cryogenic engine on the last of the 400-tonne rocket’s three stages.

According to Krishnamurthy, ISRO now has in place all the elements needed for a competitive global programme — rockets, satellites, ground control systems, trained personnel and a near- equatorial launchpad at Sriharikota.