India will use a mini-rocket with a booster to fly a winged reusable launch vehicle (RLV) into lower earth orbit on May 23 for demonstrating the technology its space agency developed. The state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has designed and built the 1.7-tonne RLV-TD as a flying testbed to evaluate technologies developed to reduce the cost of launching rockets for carrying satellites into the earth’s polar and geo-stationary orbits.

The experimental launch will be from ISRO’s spaceport at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, about 80 km northeast of Chennai off the Bay of Bengal coast. Rockets for launching satellites and space exploration are made at the space agency’s VSSC at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. The long-term objective of this mission is to reduce the launch cost to one-tenth of the present through a reusable vehicle. Space agencies worldwide spend, on average, $20,000 to make and use medium-to-heavy weight rockets to launch satellites.

The space agency is developing the RLV and its support systems from the budget earmarked annually for technology development and research and development. The cost of developing the RLV technology is estimated to be about Rs.100 crore ($15 million). Besides the US (NASA) and Russia (Roscomos), Japan (Jaxa) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have developed the RLV technology.