ISRO’S Reusable Launch Vehicle

• 03 Apr 2023

On April 1, 2023 the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) achieved a major milestone by successfully landing a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) in an autonomous mission at the Aeronautical Test Range of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district.

About the Experiment: The experiment, named the Reusable Launch Vehicle Autonomous Landing Mission (RLV LEX), was conducted under the exact conditions of a space re-entry vehicle’s landing and utilised several indigenous systems developed by ISRO, including localized navigation systems based on pseudolite systems and instrumentation and sensor systems.

• The RLV LEX mission achieved the final approach phase that coincided with the re-entry flight path exhibiting an autonomous, high-speed (350 kmph) landing, making it a significant milestone for the Indian space agency.
• The LEX made use of contemporary technologies developed for RLV, making other operational launch vehicles of ISRO more cost-effective.

Signifance: The successful experiment marks a significant step forward in India's goal to send reusable rockets into space and reduce the cost of the process by 80%.

• The RLV is expected to enable India to have its own reusable rockets and landing craft for specific mission goals.
• Chairman of ISRO, praised the achievement and stated that the success of the experiment has edged India closer to developing an Orbital Landing Experiment.
• He further added that more experiments are in the pipeline to ensure that the RLV succeeds in payload delivery to low earth orbit.

Previous experiment: ISRO first demonstrated the re-entry of its winged vehicle RLV-TD in its HEX Mission in May 2016.