India’s Reusable Launch Vehicle Demonstrator Successfully Flight Tested
isro.gov.in
isro.gov.in
> May 23, 2016 ISRO successfully flight tested India’s first winged body aerospace vehicle operating in hypersonic flight regime.
> In this experimental mission, the HS9 solid rocket booster carrying RLV-TD lifted off from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota at 07:00hr IST. After a successful flight of 91.1second, HS9 burn out occurred, following which both HS9 and RLV-TD mounted on its top coasted to a height of about 56 km. At that height, RLV-TD separated from HS9 booster and further ascended to a height of about 65km
So the solid rocket booster, HS9, wasn't reusable.
What looks more interesting to me is:
> The vehicle’s Navigation, Guidance and Control system accurately steered the vehicle during this phase for safe descent
Was it unmanned? On Autopilot?
Pictures and details: http://www.isro.gov.in/launchers/rlv-td
EDIT: according to Wikipedia, the ultimate goal seems to be a fully reusable setup:
> The demonstration trials will pave the way for a two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) fully re-usable launch vehicle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Flight_Experiment
Note that the US Air Force has a re-usable winged unmanned spacecraft that plays a somewhat analogous role to the now-defunct Space Shuttle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-14/a-supersec...
It's more analogous to a reusable space capsule than it is to the space shuttle which mostly launched itself.
The key analogous role I'm referring to is the ability to deploy, capture, and return payloads to Earth, which is shared by the X-37 and the shuttle. It's not a coincidence that the Air Force developed the X-37 when the shuttle retired.
After Challenger the Air Force cancelled its plan to use the shuttle for satellites and opted instead for more conventional boosters.
I can't remember whether it was after Challenger or Columbia but didn't NASA also stop returning payloads from orbit from safety reasons after one of those disasters?
I'm sure the Air Force is using the X-37 for something, although they're not saying what, but I don't see how whatever it is has to do with the timeline of the cancellation of the shuttle program.
Fortunately, that isn't directly applicable to ballistic missiles and certainly couldn't have anything to do with this project. /s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Technology_Demonstr...
First stage of TSTO will have delta wings and scramjet engine for landing. Second stage will have parachutes for landing[0].
The winged body that was tested two months ago will be the first stage of TSTO. In this experiment, ISRO tested aerodynamics and flight control systems of this delta-winged body at hypersonic speeds.
In the next experiment (scheduled on July), ISRO will be testing the scramjet engine.
This is the easy step – comparable to the American X-15, X-23, ASSET, and SpaceShipOne projects, the Russian BOR-1 to -6 or ESA's IXV demonstrator –, turning this into a Space Shuttle / Buran / X-37b style actual space plane will be a long, expensive undertaking.
And, as the Space Shuttle demonstrated, "recoverable" and "reusable" are two different beasts: The Shuttle's engines returned to Earth, but were so burned out from each launch that they required a refurbishment 80% as expensive as a whole new engine, and only managed an average of 5 launches even with that – planned were 55 flights without major refurbishments.
It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX, in case anyone is wondering: This is the upper stage portion that goes into orbit, and needs a booster to get into (or close to) orbit first. Those can be more expensive than the actual plane, depending on the design:
• The X-37b launches atop an Atlas rocket, and its expensive stages are completely lost.
• ESA's Hermes was supposed to launch on the similarly fully expendable Ariane 5.
For regular satellite launches, you don't save much money with these designs – since you don't need to return the orbital part anyway, you can just launch the Atlas/Ariane without the expensive plane on top and still come out cheaper. It's mainly relevant for manned programmes, which is why the Hermes was cancelled (since ESA's manned programme never got the necessary funding) and Ariane 5 just launched without, and why the X-37b is restricted to classified launches that probably involve returning things back to Earth (which is where space planes really shine!).
And even for manned programs, space planes don't necessarily lead to cost savings:
• The Space Shuttle put all expensive parts – engines, avionics, and so on – into the orbiter, and only the big external tank burned up. The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment (unlike the main engines). If the engines and heat shield hadn't been such massive failures, it might have worked out to be reasonably cheap in the long run. Alas. The way it turned out, it was a ridiculous money sink.
• The Russians, as always, decided to out-crazy everyone and put engines on the Buran orbiter, even more and even bigger engines on the external tank, oh and let's use four boosters instead of two. And make those liquid-fueled, so that each side booster is as complex as a smaller rocket on its own (and can be used as such). To everyone's surprise, this bankrupted the Buran program. There were plans to put foldable wings on the side boosters and orbiter-style delta wings and heat shields on the external tanks and turn everything into UAVs that automatically land on runways after detaching, but the Soviet Union preferred dissolution over funding any of that.
Mitchell Burnside Clapp had a somewhat innovative idea in that rather than deal with all those expensive expendable boosters you could add a little more mass to the actual launch vehicle and then use high altitude in-flight refueling.
The main issue is the forces acting on the vehicle along multiple axes.
For a VTVL rocket like the Falcon 9, there is just one main axis along which acceleration and load-bearing is going through: straight up and down.
For a space plane, you have at least two. One along the thrust line, and another when it is supporting itself on the ground and in flight. So now you have to reinforce the structure more, which adds a lot of weight.
And that's disregarding the thermal protection system which is more complicated too.
>It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX ... Those can be more expensive than the actual plane
You misunderstand. The capabilities ISRO demonstrated today are for developing a reusable first stage (booster), not a reusable second stage.
>The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment
They also contained thrust vectoring equipment on the rear. All those actuators, controllers, etc had to be completely disassembled, cleaned, inspected, reassembled, and recertified after being fished out of the ocean.
Like the Shuttle, the SRBs were more expensive to refurbish than an expendable design would have been.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00945765799...
How is a winged space plane, complete with heat shields and everything, a first stage booster design?
Source : http://www.space.com/28520-europe-launches-mini-shuttle-ixv....
Edit: @a16z -> @pmarca
Honestly, its the consensus language, since its already is the commercial language of the world. Knowledge and fluency in English is the basic for cultural and professional sophistication (in India). India during the moguls had similar thing with farsi. BJP(current ruling party) want to impose Hindi, but primarily South and East peripheries have strong linguistic identities usually are not comfortable, so English is the happy compromise.
I've noticed this in Kenya (and Africa in general) as well. People say they're against European imperialism, but really they're not, considering how the state holds what was injected in higher esteem than whatever is native. It seems that most of the indignance pointed to at @pmarca is about (white) guilt shaming.
Paulson from yesterday should be glad to hear of this heretic analysis :)
Edit: Change @a16z to @pmarca
If I understand your logic correctly, it seems that you are suggesting that a country or a community should either reinvent every useful thing that was introduced by colonialists or should not take a stand against the ideas of colonialism, racism and discrimination!
It's a fact that Britishers introduced a lot of technology in this world and helped bring it to many countries but I feel that it would have been much better if they would have tried to integrate with these countries rather than trying to follow a master-slave approach. Anyways, what's done is done but we can certainly hope that going forward the world can be a more equal place.
I'm sure you sensed the sarcasm, but forgive me, I don't think a country which produced Panini, needed the English to teach it to speak.
Is this strange "stockholm syndrome" a result of the country's caste system ? Does everyone in India speak English ? If not, is there a linguistic class/caste divide (like South Africa) ?
Criticizing @pmarca on his comments on colonialism has got less to do with his race and more to do with the contents of his comments. I am certain that a person of any other race or ethnicity making such a comment would have received similar criticism (and rightfully so).
On the a16z note, do you mean the Marc Andreessen's colonial comments? I don't remember any squabble with a16z and Indians as a whole.
Punjabi is not a dialect of Hindi.
For a more controversial example, I'd say maybe Urdu/Hindi are basically the same language written in Devanagari or Urdu. (btw, I just looked at Shahmukhi on wikipedia and it is exactly the same as Urdu).
In my opinion, India's adoption of English as standard language of business is a logical choice as it is not only helpful in faster technological progress of the country but is also understood (in some capacity) by majority of the population.
See, http://www.flipkart.com/ (only English) vs http://www.rakuten.co.jp/ (English/Japanese) vs http://www.baidu.com/ (Mandarin).
India is not exactly on the same stage globally as China or Japan, when it comes to Tech, despite what you claim.
It looks like http://www.aliexpress.com/ has support for more Indian languages than Flipkart. Surely supporting different languages for such a unicorn (which often shows up on HN) can't be that difficult a task ?
None of the countries you named were ruled or for that matter created by a colonial ruler with another language. India in its current form never existed, its like the EU, there are several states with their own languages, and English is the common one.
As for Aliexpress offering several languages - its just the google translate plugin ;).
This is technically true in that yes, a state with precisely India's borders today did not exist before 1947. But that is a useless claim because that is true for every country in the world.
There are have been many many empires, going back all the way back at least 2300 years, and these empires have ruled the majority of the Indian subcontinent. This includes most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan. Some of them also ruled parts of Iran, Tibet, and a little bit of Central Asia. And these empires all had linguistic diversity. The idea that one language = one country is a stupid byproduct of European nationalist movements.
It's not giving up the languages if we were to find a logical(because the rest of the world speaks this too) common medium to speak.
And,
I am amazed as to how you are trying to connect dots from 'you guys speak English, so you have to also support colonialism, if not, you are hypocrites and pmarca is right'.
Also, the people who are online are mostly people who understand English. Supporting languages does not increase their outreach.
China also had an authoritarian government willing to impose Beijing Mandarin as the standard language for the whole country. I don't know that India's government would have been willing or able to do something similar.
The spiritual center of my culture is apparently long dead; I don't really care about what they do over there anymore.
Spare a poor soul some up votes.
And if you wanted to bring up this up, I don't see why you had to use Marc Andressen to bring it up. And asking for votes after mis understanding and then mis representing people's points is not going to get you any up votes.
No one here is arguing that English is the ONLY rational choice, nor is it in reality. India has 18 official languages. English is just one of them.
- My contention is not about speaking English, "rational" people (I speak English!). It is about how economically dominant a language is; in East Asia/Europe getting a good job without knowing the local language is extraordinarily difficult. Speaking English (without other awesome skills) often lands one a position teaching high schoolers.
- This power/economic structure is inverted in formerly colonized African nations as noted by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. He was kicked out for raising such questions (so much for Kenyan Independence).
- It's very apparent that this is the case in India too.
Why?
- It doesn't look like one can get a Tech job at ISRO (imaginably also Flipkart) having a Engineering degree in one of the native languages. What appears to be Hindi is barely to be found on the menus on its front page.
A "lingua franca" is one to which everyone makes a translation from the original, for the world to read. It appears that the original itself is in English, here!
- This being the case, I'm not even sure if you can get a degree in anything useful in any of the native languages.
- Punching in "India English" threw up the following in the first few results, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english...
- There seems to be lots of chatter in the search results on an as yet unnamed invisible hand disenfranchising people linguistically (people are taught in English ??!).
- According to Wiki, only 10% of India speaks English.
This is the classic workings of a feudal - ironically a pre-enlightenment - state, if not one practicing outright apartheid.
It's almost as if India stepped into medieval Europe's shoes where the rich sent their kids to Latin grammar schools; or Tsarist Russia where French was the langue de l'élite (atleast Tolstoy wrote in Russian as noted by the NyT article!).
If you want to invalidate my understanding, either show one of the above to false, or show why it's alright by making statements about their benignity (vis a vis a linguistically diverse EU, for instance). Otherwise, please spare me the downvotes and the verbiage.
I don't think such political HN threads help anyone (although, they do reveal colors).
And be logical, English will always be needed. Which company in the world would be able to deal with 28 official languages internally? Also, there are start-ups moving to address the local market (e-commerce in Tamil, Hindi etc.
All of what you've said btw is mere opinion. None of what you say us objective fact. Speaking the language of your former colonizer doesn't mean the people lack self-respect nor does it have anything to do with any of the "virtues of freedom" as you've pointed out.
I'm not even sure you understand philosophy or the epistemological meanings of the words you are so desperate to bolster these stupid narratives.
See, the thing is, you don't invalidate any of what I said.
- 90% of India's population does not speak English. This is not "mere opinion".
- EU uses 24 official languages; companies work in the language of the state. East-Asian companies work and do engineering in their respective languages. Unless you claim Indian languages are somehow intrinsically "useless", your narrative is full of BS.
- It's not about "speaking" as was mentioned earlier. It was obvious I was talking about technical/commercial usage. I'm glad it's required in the Govt; it appears this is only the case for low-level jobs. It looks like the country's laws etc. (apparently even the courts ?) function in English. Countries in East-Asia do engineering/business etc. in their own respective languages, some borrowing terms from English, and others (like CN) going out of their way to avoid them.
I don't mean language usage in the Kitchen; I'm not even sure how this can be "economically useful".
- You invalidate nothing written in the NyT article.
Your "argument" is essentially one saying, "ah it's too much work to keep our own identities, so let's just adopt one of the old colonizer". What a pathetic country, and what a fall.
Noam Chomsky notes somewhere the corruption these idiots in post-modernism have on the third world, where intellectuals are desperately needed. I can see what he meant.
And which company works in multiple languages within it's own home country?
Your wiki source relies on 2001 data (and only considers English speakers [0] and you used as logic that 90% of India doesn't speak English, so it is in fact, mere opinion - yours). When counting both users and speakers, the value was 350M which is ~30% of the population.
It is about speaking. On a single team does it make sense that one does the docs in Hindi, and the non-Hindi speakers do what exactly with this doc? Or does he/she do one in each language? Will every college teach subjects in 28 different languages? Does any European university teach each subject in 28 languages? Do any of the countries in East Asia?
Your NYT article is an opinion piece, it's not admissible or inadmissible. If you're relying on opinion pieces, your logic is already flawed.
Most of what you say is a misrepresentation of facts.
[0]- "Wikipedia's old estimate of 350 million includes two categories – "English Speakers" and "English Users". The distinction between the Speakers and Users is that Users only know how to read English words while Speakers know how to read English, understand spoken English as well as form their own sentences to converse in English.
- some unqualified pedantry about the data being from 2001. "Oh yeah, we used to oppress people for eons; they've adapted in the past decade."
- The number of fluent English speakers is apparently in the low single digits. Fairly obvious there is a nauseous class system in India, from the NyT article (speaking English gets you a good job ? What kind of society is that ? India is Anglo-Saxon ?).
- I don't think India is "country" in the same way as European states are. To be fair to Europe, Belgium today does work today with both Dutch and French. As a cohort of people, EU, is much closer to India, in terms of diversity etc (yes, I looked up the demographics).
- If you wish to use the epistemological grounding of a European, you're essentially vindicating my position: you have no understanding of the language/concepts you speak.
- Finally, I really don't want to continue this exercise in shallowness (even the narratives are so shallow!). Asking me to answer rhetorical questions hardly amounts to reason.
Good luck being a (medieval) WASP clone, and trampling on people's tongues (see, now, that is an interesting narrative).
More resources on this ghastly society,
- A book which basically arrives at the same conclusion: India is a linguistic apartheid state , https://books.google.com/books?id=QJpjhC6BuM4C&pg=PA124&lpg=...
- India ranks in the bottom 73-74 in PISA (while China/Japan/S.Korea are in the top 10; Vietnam in the top-20s).
- India's literacy is < 80%, probably because there's no real opportunity even if you're educated (and have the misfortune of not speaking English).
- http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/why-india-must-move-beyond-en...
I'm surprised there hasn't been a rerun of French revolution by the proletariat; or may be India just doesn't care - that'd explain the colonization.
I can only hope India goes through "clone wars" for humanity's sake.
A question - how many east asian programmers write C/C++/Java programs in Korean, Japanese or Chinese ? And if they do, do they have resources such as stackoverflow and forums in their languages ? What about Spanish, German and French programmers ?
Another question - what percentage of a population in any country is engineers ? Is it closer to 90% or 10% in above countries ?
Your points about equal access to opportunity are valid, but the assumption that this is responsible for the GDP being low is not in my opinion - there more complex factors.
In any case since you are feel this is important (there are relatively few who do), please try to improve the situation in some way, rather than just complain. It is hard.
In the first link you sent, read a couple pages down and it explains why even half knowledge of english is critical to capture opportunities as they exist in the present.
Your argument is no different from that "rational" @kartD. It's fairly obvious, you don't even know the definition of a "language" is. If you needed an answer, a google search would have done you good ("yes"); asking me to answer rhetorical devices like "ah, but oppression is our only way towards progress!" is stupid. Somehow no Indian has the comprehension to understand why.
Considering the same thing repeated ad nauseum, I also sense strong doses of brainwashing, or the Indian state employing a 50-cent army like Mao's men. I hope for India's sake that it is the latter.
Instead of worrying about India, I suggest you take care of your own (serious lack of) sanity. There is a hindi saying which comes to mind - adhajal gagri chhalakat jaaye - or, empty vessels make the most noise, which based on your "long dead spiritual center", applies to you.
I might be generalizing a bit but it's truly a widespread thing, I'm sure other Indian HN users can attest to this.
- You try to strike a conversation with a girl in Hindi in a bar, you will get laughed at or ignored. But you speak fluent english and you have a much higher chance of having a conversation.
- Every parent wants to send their child to an english medium school and it's only the poor ones who don't have many options around who settle for their children to be in a local language school (The quality of teachers would also vary accordingly).
- A sportsperson (usually a cricketer), goes up to the post-match presentation to take an award and speaks in broken english, millions of people watching it would start cracking jokes on him.
There are countless other examples. Yes, knowing english is good to compete in a global economy but the obsession with the language that the middle/upper class shows is ridiculous. There are several reasons for this trend but it's definitely a direct impact of the British rule.
There is a brilliant Bollywood family movie on this topic - English Vinglish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2181931/) I would really recommend you to watch it if you're into good foreign cinema.
I've never seen this stuff never mentioned in the media; I had know about the colonial education/stifling wartime British bureaucracy etc. and assorted ideas from reading Naipaul's book. I didn't think it was this bad.
I find it ironic that such elites hold the values of enlightenment Europe to such high standard while implementing the policies of medieval Europe. Best of luck to you; considering the boisterous opposition here, I can only imagine what it'd take to bring political change in such a vast country.
The bar situation has an additional twist. Most bilingual people I know would use the Indian language with friends and family and English with strangers. So trying to start a conversation in Hindi may come across as being too familiar too soon.
English happens to be an Indo-European language and does not seem as 'foreign' to Indians as Indian numerals might have appeared to Europeans.
As an aside, English has recognizable weaknesses as a medium of expression to Indian minds, and if a replacement will be found, chances are it will be synthesized in India.