Today, GSLV To Carry A Satellite And India's Hopes For Moon Mission

[AugenBlick]

Just confirming this is Indian made GSLV and not the ones we bought from Russia right?

You mean the Cryo engines...Yup .. The ones we bought from Russia got over in 2007 or so. We have been going at it alone since at least 2k10

 

[Hulk]

You mean the Cryo engines...Yup .. The ones we bought from Russia got over in 2007 or so. We have been going at it alone since at least 2k10

I thought this one was first successful launch with India engine.

 

[indiatester]

I thought this one was first successful launch with India engine.

This is the first operational launch and third successful with indigenous cryogenic engine. Earlier launches are development flights.

 

[Hulk]

This is the first operational launch and third successful with indigenous cryogenic engine. Earlier launches are development flights.

Yeah did we not test those in Lab? Basically saying this is first end to end and has reason to celebrate.

 

[monitor]

How ISRO developed the indigenous cryogenic engine
Hari Pulakkat, ET Bureau Jan 9, 2014, 07.24AM IST

• 

(The journey was shot through…)
The year was 1987. V Gnanagandhi, head of the cryogenic engine project at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), wanted to set up a high-pressure hydrogen plant in Mahendragiri near Thiruvanathapuram. But an official from the supplier of the machinery, a German company called Messers Grieshem, suddenly threw a spanner in the works. "There are snakes and elephants on the roads in India," he told them. "How can I come there?"

Gnanagandhi reached a compromise with the Grieshem executive. He need come only as far as Mumbai; the entire ISRO team would meet him there. He agreed. The German—his name is now forgotten—agreed to sell the machinery, but was also inquisitive. "Why do you need a high-pressure hydrogen facility?" he asked. "We are using it to launch rockets," came the answer. "You cannot just fill an engine tank with high-pressure hydrogen," he told the ISRO team. "It will evaporate in no time." The ISRO engineers, thus, learned a thing or two about dealing with hydrogen at high pressure.

A few days ago, Gnanagandhi retired after watching his baby fly on a Geostationary Launch Vehicle (GSLV), marking the culmination of a journey that was shot through with frustrations, technology denials, quiet diplomacy and sheer hard work. After two decades of development, India developed the cryogenic technology, giving it the much-needed capability to launch medium-sized satellites in a geostationary orbit, and joined an exclusive club of six nations. But on that day in 1987, at their Mumbai Guest House, ISRO engineers, led by Gnanagandhi, were taught a thing or two about hydrogen under pressure by their German guest.

Obtaining The Engine

Brought into the nascent cryogenic engine team in 1984, Gnanagandhi had begun his job with clean slate. He had not even heard about the cryogenic engine. He didn't know how to get liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen, let alone how to use them in an engine. But he learned quickly, set up the facilities, and made a one-tonne prototype engine by 1988. It blew up during a test. "We had used liquid nitrogen to clean the nozzle," says Gnanagandhi. "And nitrogen solidifies and clogs the nozzle at liquid oxygen temperatures." ISRO was led by UR Rao at that time. ISRO had been planning larger rockets.

Cryogenic engines were absolutely essential to put satellites in geostationary orbit, but the technology was difficult and a closely guarded secret. India had offers of engines. US firm General Dynamics offered first at a high price, and so did the French. It was then that Russia, which was going through difficult times, offered it at a reasonable price. India signed a deal in 1991 for two engines and the technology.

Everything looked good, but soon wasn't. The Americans pressurised the Russians into reneging on the deal, saying its engines will be used for nuclear missiles.

ISRO would get the engines but not the technology. UR Rao went to talk to the Americans, and to tell them something that everybody knew: cryogenic engines cannot be used in a missile. But the US had strong commercial interests in denying India the technology. Rao's meeting with vice-president Al Gore was futile.

Rao then negotiated with the Russians. "I told them that I had paid them too much money for just two engines," says Rao. "If you are not giving me the technology, give me six more engines." Eventually ISRO got seven engines. However, flying them was not a simple matter as there were no data about their performance. The engines that ISRO got hadn't been flown yet in any rocket. ISRO engineers discovered they had to work hard to make the engines fly in their launch vehicle. "We found that the Russian engines did not perform as well as we expected," says Vishnu Kartha, who now heads the cryogenic project.

Developing The Technology

If flying the Russian engines was hard, copying the engine design was harder. The Russians had designed these engines in the 1960s but not flown them, probably because they were still not flight ready. Moreover, they used a technology— called stage combustion—that was efficient but difficult. It made the engine a bit heavy but gave the highest efficiencies for a specific amount of propellant. The indigenous engines had to be exactly like the Russian engines: the GSLV has already been planned based on them.

The Indian government gave a formal approval to the Cryogenic Upper Stage (CUS) project in 1994. The budget was Rs 300 crore. ISRO then made a key decision quite in keeping with its tradition: involve the private industry from the beginning. "We didn't want to first develop the technology and then transfer it," says BN Suresh, now Vikram Sarabhai distinguished professor in ISRO.

The two major partners were Godrej and the MTAR Technologies. Godrej set up the rotary vacuum brazing facility in Mumbai. Brazing was a key and difficult technology, and setting up the facility took more than a year. MTAR made the turbo pump and some other components.
The sophistication of the cryogenic engine would be obvious from a few simple facts. The liquid hydrogen is kept at -253 degree centigrade. The turbo pump operates at 500 degree centigrade and rotates 40,000 times a minute. The combustion temperature is around 3,000 degree centigrade.

The pressure inside the combustion chamber is 60 times the atmospheric pressure. The chamber wall has to withstand the high pressure and temperature. No material can withstand a temperature of 3,000 degree centigrade, and so the combustion chamber wall has to be cooled.

Lift Off

ISRO's cryogenic team made the first 7.5-tonne engine in 2000. It blew up while being tested. The hydrogen valve had prematurely closed, affecting the oxygenhydrogen ratio in the combustion chamber. "We became failure-hardened," says Mohammed Mulsim, head of the cryogenic project at that time. "After each failure we went back not to the Russian engines but to the drawing board." They succeeded finally in 2002. The indigenous cryogenic engine was qualified in 2003. It took another four years to integrate it with the GSLV. But the first flight failed in 2010, as the engine shut down three seconds after ignition.

ISRO then conducted a thorough review of the entire GSLV project. For the cryogenic engine, special vacuum testing facilities were created at Mahendragiri. By 2013 end, every likely cause of failure was looked into. A few days before the GSLV flew on January 5, ISRO officials conducted a review meeting to clear the vehicle for launch. Such meetings usually take several hours. This one ended in 45 minutes. Every possibility had been analysed, and project leaders were quietly confident.

When it flew, the GSLV put the satellite into orbit with a precision never possible with the Russian engines. "We took a long time to develop the engine," says ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, "but all countries took 10-15 years to develop cryogenic technology." ISRO now has to develop a more powerful engine, to put a 4-tonne satellite into geosynchronous orbit. The older generation that led the first cryogenic engine development has retired. It has been such a long journey, it gave the younger generation now in command a deep understanding of cryogenic technology. And they have long stints left in ISRO.

 

[monitor]

How India’s cryogenic programme was wrecked
4 December 2013 Rakesh Krishnan Simha
India was all set to master Russian cryogenic rocket technology when the United States – in cahoots with its moles in the Indian Intelligence Bureau – set in motion a series of events that implicated India’s leading space scientists on cooked-up charges.

Headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Source: Corbis/Fotosa
To understand the extent of damage caused to India’s space programme because of the ISRO spy case, one has to first look at how close India was to mastering cryogenic rocket technology.

Cryogenic rocket technology involves the use of super-cooled liquid fuels to produce massive amounts of thrust in order to lift heavy payloads into space. It will be at the heart of India's GSLV rocket, which will carry future Indian astronauts to the moon. Without a reliable GSLV India will continue to pay heavy launch fees to foreign space agencies. Because it takes several hours to fuel up a cryogenic rocket, such a rocket cannot be used as a ballistic missile.

This leads to two questions. One, if the United States is really concerned about India developing long-range ballistic missiles, then shouldn’t it try and stop the guys at the Defence Research & Development Organisation, which makes the Agni missiles? Secondly, why would the United States want to delay the development of India’s heavy lift commercial rockets?


Cryogenic countdown: How the GSLV became India’s missile impossible

It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to figure that out. India is the only developing country with heavy lift ambitions and its ultra-low cost model could one day put the likes of NASA out of business. That’s an eventuality that the United States wants to delay for as long as it can.

Birth of a rocket

Author and broadcaster Brian Harvey writes in his exhaustively researched book ‘Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier’ that in the late 1980s India was looking to develop a massive rocket to launch satellites into 24-hour orbit. India first talked to Japan but nothing came off it. Hearing of these overtures, the Indians were approached first by General Dynamics Corporation, which offered an American engine. But the cost was prohibitive as was an offer shortly thereafter from Europe's Arianespace.

“Just then a third approach came, this time from the Soviet Union, offering two engines and technology transfer for the more reasonable price of $200 million,” writes Harvey.

The Russians were offering a secret engine, the RD-56 or KVD-1, built by the Isayev Design Bureau. The KVD-1 had unsurpassed thrust and capabilities and NASA had nothing that could match the Russian engine for years. In fact, the rocket engine was originally developed as part of the Soviet manned moon landing programme as far back as 1964.

Over to Moscow

On January 18, 1991 the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) inked an agreement with the Russian space agency Glavkosmos for the transfer of cryogenic technology. Following the collapse of its Soviet empire, Russia was under considerable American influence. In this backdrop, both Glavkosmos and ISRO anticipated the United States would try and stymie the deal.

So Glavkosmos and ISRO drew up Plan B – outsource the manufacture of the cryogenic engines to Kerala Hi-tech Industries Limited (KELTEC). The arrangement was designed to get around the provisions of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) – a Western cabal that aims to deny ballistic missile technology to non-Western countries, especially India.


Hot topic: Space
The space czars of the two countries – Aleksey Vasin, officer-in-charge of cryogenic technology in Glavkosmos, and ISRO Chairman U.R. Rao – reckoned that if Russian cryogenic technology was passed on to ISRO via KELTEC, technically it would not be a violation of the MTCR.

Rocket row

The arrangements were denounced by American President George Bush as a violation of the MTCR. In May 1992 the United States slapped sanctions on ISRO and Glavkosmos. “India objected strongly to the American actions, pointing out that high-powered hydrogen-fuelled upper stages which took a long time to prepare were of little military value,” writes Harvey.

India also pointed out the Americans had offered them the very same technology and had made no objections throughout the years 1988-92 when the arrangements had begun.

So does that mean the Americans were trying to achieve the dual aim of crippling both the Indian and Russian space programmes? Well, here’s Glavkosmos’ version.

Glavkosmos official Nikolai Semyonov accused Washington of attempting to destroy Russia's space industry. “When working out the contract, we used the MTCR guidelines in reaching the contract with India...what is more, Indian partners said at the start and later confirmed that they would use our technology exclusively for peaceful purposes.”



India to launch second moon mission without Russia

Tango in space: Choose your partner carefully

Indo-Russian lunar mission still on, but delayed

Glavkosmos Chairman Aleksandr Dunayev said both Russia and India had called for an international inspection to determine that the deal did indeed comply with the terms of the MTCR. However, the United States did not respond to the proposal, but sent a US team to Russia to examine the situation.

Clinton: Playing hardball with India

Former US President Bill Clinton and his hawkish wife Hillary Rodham Clinton are for some inexplicable reason considered friends of India. It was under President Clinton that Russia backed off its proposals to transfer technology to India and suspended its agreement, invoking force majeure (circumstances beyond its control).

Under the revised Russia-India agreement in January 1994, Moscow agreed to transfer three, later renegotiated by India to seven fully assembled KVD-1 engines, without the associated technology. The United States also inserted a humiliating clause, according to which India would “agree to use the equipment purely for peaceful purposes, not to re-export it or modernise it without Russia's consent”. No blueprints were to be given to India.

Duma fury

The Russian Parliament, however, was in no mood to let President Boris Yeltsin bail on India. On July 21, 1993 it passed a resolution declaring that international negotiations and agreements regarding the MTCR must be ratified by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation.

A day later, Glavkosmos upped the pressure on Yeltsin, saying a decision to alter the Indian contract needed a special decision of the government. “We shall not stop fulfilling our obligations under the (Indian) contract until there is a government decision to the contrary,” said Glavkosmos’ Semyonov.
Space Pacts to put Indo-Russian ties in still higher orbit

Really friendly scientists

Russian scientists sympathetic to the Indian cause realised the tech transfer window was about to close, and decided to transfer the production technology to their old friends.

However, with American spies crawling all over Russia during the early 1990s, transferring such a large cargo wasn’t going to be easy. “ISRO first contacted Air India but the airline said it could not transport the equipment without customs clearance. And that was not possible without the American lobby in Russia coming to know about it,” J. Rajasekharan Nair reveals in his book, Spies From Space: The ISRO Frame-Up.

So ISRO entered into an agreement with Russia’s Ural Airlines, which was ready to take the risk for a little extra money. According to Harvey, “The appropriate documents, instruments and equipment were allegedly transferred in four shipments from Moscow to Delhi on covert flights by Ural Airlines. As a cover, they used 'legitimate' transhipments of Indian aircraft technology travelling the other way to Moscow for testing in Russian wind-tunnels.”

This was confirmed by cryogenic team leader Nambi Narayanan who told the Indian media he was on board the flights that transported the technology to India.

The knife turns

The United States knew further arm-twisting at the diplomatic level would not be productive, says Nair. “So the CIA was entrusted with the job of aborting the circumlocutory transfer of cryogenic rocket technology through KELTEC, and of stalling or discrediting the transportation of raw materials and spare parts to ISRO.”
Russia seeks Indian cooperation to counter space threats

Who’s working for the CIA in India?

The first hint there was a foreign hand trying to destroy – or at the very least slow down – India's space programme surfaced in 1997 when five leading scientists – Satish Dhawan, U.R. Rao, Yashpal, Rodham Narasimha and K. Chandrasekhar – along with former Chief Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan wrote a joint letter to the government, saying the espionage charges against Nambi Narayanan and Sasi Kumaran were fabricated.

These were not ordinary people – they were public figures who clearly knew a thing or two about the inner workings of ISRO and the law and order system. And yet despite their plea, the IB tortured Nambi Narayanan to get him to implicated higher ups at ISRO. If Narayanan had cracked and acquiesced, perhaps the entire organisation would have collapsed.

It is a measure of how successful the CIA was in this spy game that its agents in the Kerala Police and Intelligence Bureau (IB) were able to have a swing at just about everyone in the cryogenic project.

For instance, the IB had Vasin of Glavkosmos interrogated at Moscow, and tried to link him to the case. “The IB implicated Ural Airlines after airing the lie that Ural had, as part of the espionage activities, transported documents from ISRO to Glavkosmos,” says Nair.

(Nair also claims because of pressure from above, his book was made to disappear from stores and was never reprinted.)

That the policemen who went after India’s top scientists and the IB men who guided them have been either cleared of all wrongdoing or remain unquestioned hints at their connections way up in the political leadership. The big question is who are these people who aided the CIA in scuttling India’s biggest space project?

 

[Nilgiri]

How India’s cryogenic programme was wrecked
4 December 2013 Rakesh Krishnan Simha
India was all set to master Russian cryogenic rocket technology when the United States – in cahoots with its moles in the Indian Intelligence Bureau – set in motion a series of events that implicated India’s leading space scientists on cooked-up charges.

Headquarters of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). Source: Corbis/Fotosa
To understand the extent of damage caused to India’s space programme because of the ISRO spy case, one has to first look at how close India was to mastering cryogenic rocket technology.

Cryogenic rocket technology involves the use of super-cooled liquid fuels to produce massive amounts of thrust in order to lift heavy payloads into space. It will be at the heart of India's GSLV rocket, which will carry future Indian astronauts to the moon. Without a reliable GSLV India will continue to pay heavy launch fees to foreign space agencies. Because it takes several hours to fuel up a cryogenic rocket, such a rocket cannot be used as a ballistic missile.

This leads to two questions. One, if the United States is really concerned about India developing long-range ballistic missiles, then shouldn’t it try and stop the guys at the Defence Research & Development Organisation, which makes the Agni missiles? Secondly, why would the United States want to delay the development of India’s heavy lift commercial rockets?


Cryogenic countdown: How the GSLV became India’s missile impossible

It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to figure that out. India is the only developing country with heavy lift ambitions and its ultra-low cost model could one day put the likes of NASA out of business. That’s an eventuality that the United States wants to delay for as long as it can.

Birth of a rocket

Author and broadcaster Brian Harvey writes in his exhaustively researched book ‘Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier’ that in the late 1980s India was looking to develop a massive rocket to launch satellites into 24-hour orbit. India first talked to Japan but nothing came off it. Hearing of these overtures, the Indians were approached first by General Dynamics Corporation, which offered an American engine. But the cost was prohibitive as was an offer shortly thereafter from Europe's Arianespace.

“Just then a third approach came, this time from the Soviet Union, offering two engines and technology transfer for the more reasonable price of $200 million,” writes Harvey.

The Russians were offering a secret engine, the RD-56 or KVD-1, built by the Isayev Design Bureau. The KVD-1 had unsurpassed thrust and capabilities and NASA had nothing that could match the Russian engine for years. In fact, the rocket engine was originally developed as part of the Soviet manned moon landing programme as far back as 1964.

Over to Moscow

On January 18, 1991 the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) inked an agreement with the Russian space agency Glavkosmos for the transfer of cryogenic technology. Following the collapse of its Soviet empire, Russia was under considerable American influence. In this backdrop, both Glavkosmos and ISRO anticipated the United States would try and stymie the deal.

So Glavkosmos and ISRO drew up Plan B – outsource the manufacture of the cryogenic engines to Kerala Hi-tech Industries Limited (KELTEC). The arrangement was designed to get around the provisions of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) – a Western cabal that aims to deny ballistic missile technology to non-Western countries, especially India.


Hot topic: Space
The space czars of the two countries – Aleksey Vasin, officer-in-charge of cryogenic technology in Glavkosmos, and ISRO Chairman U.R. Rao – reckoned that if Russian cryogenic technology was passed on to ISRO via KELTEC, technically it would not be a violation of the MTCR.

Rocket row

The arrangements were denounced by American President George Bush as a violation of the MTCR. In May 1992 the United States slapped sanctions on ISRO and Glavkosmos. “India objected strongly to the American actions, pointing out that high-powered hydrogen-fuelled upper stages which took a long time to prepare were of little military value,” writes Harvey.

India also pointed out the Americans had offered them the very same technology and had made no objections throughout the years 1988-92 when the arrangements had begun.

So does that mean the Americans were trying to achieve the dual aim of crippling both the Indian and Russian space programmes? Well, here’s Glavkosmos’ version.

Glavkosmos official Nikolai Semyonov accused Washington of attempting to destroy Russia's space industry. “When working out the contract, we used the MTCR guidelines in reaching the contract with India...what is more, Indian partners said at the start and later confirmed that they would use our technology exclusively for peaceful purposes.”



India to launch second moon mission without Russia

Tango in space: Choose your partner carefully

Indo-Russian lunar mission still on, but delayed

Glavkosmos Chairman Aleksandr Dunayev said both Russia and India had called for an international inspection to determine that the deal did indeed comply with the terms of the MTCR. However, the United States did not respond to the proposal, but sent a US team to Russia to examine the situation.

Clinton: Playing hardball with India

Former US President Bill Clinton and his hawkish wife Hillary Rodham Clinton are for some inexplicable reason considered friends of India. It was under President Clinton that Russia backed off its proposals to transfer technology to India and suspended its agreement, invoking force majeure (circumstances beyond its control).

Under the revised Russia-India agreement in January 1994, Moscow agreed to transfer three, later renegotiated by India to seven fully assembled KVD-1 engines, without the associated technology. The United States also inserted a humiliating clause, according to which India would “agree to use the equipment purely for peaceful purposes, not to re-export it or modernise it without Russia's consent”. No blueprints were to be given to India.

Duma fury

The Russian Parliament, however, was in no mood to let President Boris Yeltsin bail on India. On July 21, 1993 it passed a resolution declaring that international negotiations and agreements regarding the MTCR must be ratified by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation.

A day later, Glavkosmos upped the pressure on Yeltsin, saying a decision to alter the Indian contract needed a special decision of the government. “We shall not stop fulfilling our obligations under the (Indian) contract until there is a government decision to the contrary,” said Glavkosmos’ Semyonov.
Space Pacts to put Indo-Russian ties in still higher orbit

Really friendly scientists

Russian scientists sympathetic to the Indian cause realised the tech transfer window was about to close, and decided to transfer the production technology to their old friends.

However, with American spies crawling all over Russia during the early 1990s, transferring such a large cargo wasn’t going to be easy. “ISRO first contacted Air India but the airline said it could not transport the equipment without customs clearance. And that was not possible without the American lobby in Russia coming to know about it,” J. Rajasekharan Nair reveals in his book, Spies From Space: The ISRO Frame-Up.

So ISRO entered into an agreement with Russia’s Ural Airlines, which was ready to take the risk for a little extra money. According to Harvey, “The appropriate documents, instruments and equipment were allegedly transferred in four shipments from Moscow to Delhi on covert flights by Ural Airlines. As a cover, they used 'legitimate' transhipments of Indian aircraft technology travelling the other way to Moscow for testing in Russian wind-tunnels.”

This was confirmed by cryogenic team leader Nambi Narayanan who told the Indian media he was on board the flights that transported the technology to India.

The knife turns

The United States knew further arm-twisting at the diplomatic level would not be productive, says Nair. “So the CIA was entrusted with the job of aborting the circumlocutory transfer of cryogenic rocket technology through KELTEC, and of stalling or discrediting the transportation of raw materials and spare parts to ISRO.”
Russia seeks Indian cooperation to counter space threats

Who’s working for the CIA in India?

The first hint there was a foreign hand trying to destroy – or at the very least slow down – India's space programme surfaced in 1997 when five leading scientists – Satish Dhawan, U.R. Rao, Yashpal, Rodham Narasimha and K. Chandrasekhar – along with former Chief Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan wrote a joint letter to the government, saying the espionage charges against Nambi Narayanan and Sasi Kumaran were fabricated.

These were not ordinary people – they were public figures who clearly knew a thing or two about the inner workings of ISRO and the law and order system. And yet despite their plea, the IB tortured Nambi Narayanan to get him to implicated higher ups at ISRO. If Narayanan had cracked and acquiesced, perhaps the entire organisation would have collapsed.

It is a measure of how successful the CIA was in this spy game that its agents in the Kerala Police and Intelligence Bureau (IB) were able to have a swing at just about everyone in the cryogenic project.

For instance, the IB had Vasin of Glavkosmos interrogated at Moscow, and tried to link him to the case. “The IB implicated Ural Airlines after airing the lie that Ural had, as part of the espionage activities, transported documents from ISRO to Glavkosmos,” says Nair.

(Nair also claims because of pressure from above, his book was made to disappear from stores and was never reprinted.)

That the policemen who went after India’s top scientists and the IB men who guided them have been either cleared of all wrongdoing or remain unquestioned hints at their connections way up in the political leadership. The big question is who are these people who aided the CIA in scuttling India’s biggest space project?

Wrecked temporarily.

Fun to have the last laugh.

 

[kṣamā]

Ohh and we are laughing... They just made us that bit more determined to cracked this tech. Next stop full cryo first stage with massive lift capacity.

 

[911]

How ISRO developed the indigenous cryogenic engine
Hari Pulakkat, ET Bureau Jan 9, 2014, 07.24AM IST

• 

(The journey was shot through…)
The year was 1987. V Gnanagandhi, head of the cryogenic engine project at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), wanted to set up a high-pressure hydrogen plant in Mahendragiri near Thiruvanathapuram. But an official from the supplier of the machinery, a German company called Messers Grieshem, suddenly threw a spanner in the works. "There are snakes and elephants on the roads in India," he told them. "How can I come there?"

Gnanagandhi reached a compromise with the Grieshem executive. He need come only as far as Mumbai; the entire ISRO team would meet him there. He agreed. The German—his name is now forgotten—agreed to sell the machinery, but was also inquisitive. "Why do you need a high-pressure hydrogen facility?" he asked. "We are using it to launch rockets," came the answer. "You cannot just fill an engine tank with high-pressure hydrogen," he told the ISRO team. "It will evaporate in no time." The ISRO engineers, thus, learned a thing or two about dealing with hydrogen at high pressure.

A few days ago, Gnanagandhi retired after watching his baby fly on a Geostationary Launch Vehicle (GSLV), marking the culmination of a journey that was shot through with frustrations, technology denials, quiet diplomacy and sheer hard work. After two decades of development, India developed the cryogenic technology, giving it the much-needed capability to launch medium-sized satellites in a geostationary orbit, and joined an exclusive club of six nations. But on that day in 1987, at their Mumbai Guest House, ISRO engineers, led by Gnanagandhi, were taught a thing or two about hydrogen under pressure by their German guest.

Obtaining The Engine

Brought into the nascent cryogenic engine team in 1984, Gnanagandhi had begun his job with clean slate. He had not even heard about the cryogenic engine. He didn't know how to get liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen, let alone how to use them in an engine. But he learned quickly, set up the facilities, and made a one-tonne prototype engine by 1988. It blew up during a test. "We had used liquid nitrogen to clean the nozzle," says Gnanagandhi. "And nitrogen solidifies and clogs the nozzle at liquid oxygen temperatures." ISRO was led by UR Rao at that time. ISRO had been planning larger rockets.

Cryogenic engines were absolutely essential to put satellites in geostationary orbit, but the technology was difficult and a closely guarded secret. India had offers of engines. US firm General Dynamics offered first at a high price, and so did the French. It was then that Russia, which was going through difficult times, offered it at a reasonable price. India signed a deal in 1991 for two engines and the technology.

Everything looked good, but soon wasn't. The Americans pressurised the Russians into reneging on the deal, saying its engines will be used for nuclear missiles.

ISRO would get the engines but not the technology. UR Rao went to talk to the Americans, and to tell them something that everybody knew: cryogenic engines cannot be used in a missile. But the US had strong commercial interests in denying India the technology. Rao's meeting with vice-president Al Gore was futile.

Rao then negotiated with the Russians. "I told them that I had paid them too much money for just two engines," says Rao. "If you are not giving me the technology, give me six more engines." Eventually ISRO got seven engines. However, flying them was not a simple matter as there were no data about their performance. The engines that ISRO got hadn't been flown yet in any rocket. ISRO engineers discovered they had to work hard to make the engines fly in their launch vehicle. "We found that the Russian engines did not perform as well as we expected," says Vishnu Kartha, who now heads the cryogenic project.

Developing The Technology

If flying the Russian engines was hard, copying the engine design was harder. The Russians had designed these engines in the 1960s but not flown them, probably because they were still not flight ready. Moreover, they used a technology— called stage combustion—that was efficient but difficult. It made the engine a bit heavy but gave the highest efficiencies for a specific amount of propellant. The indigenous engines had to be exactly like the Russian engines: the GSLV has already been planned based on them.

The Indian government gave a formal approval to the Cryogenic Upper Stage (CUS) project in 1994. The budget was Rs 300 crore. ISRO then made a key decision quite in keeping with its tradition: involve the private industry from the beginning. "We didn't want to first develop the technology and then transfer it," says BN Suresh, now Vikram Sarabhai distinguished professor in ISRO.

The two major partners were Godrej and the MTAR Technologies. Godrej set up the rotary vacuum brazing facility in Mumbai. Brazing was a key and difficult technology, and setting up the facility took more than a year. MTAR made the turbo pump and some other components.
The sophistication of the cryogenic engine would be obvious from a few simple facts. The liquid hydrogen is kept at -253 degree centigrade. The turbo pump operates at 500 degree centigrade and rotates 40,000 times a minute. The combustion temperature is around 3,000 degree centigrade.

The pressure inside the combustion chamber is 60 times the atmospheric pressure. The chamber wall has to withstand the high pressure and temperature. No material can withstand a temperature of 3,000 degree centigrade, and so the combustion chamber wall has to be cooled.

Lift Off

ISRO's cryogenic team made the first 7.5-tonne engine in 2000. It blew up while being tested. The hydrogen valve had prematurely closed, affecting the oxygenhydrogen ratio in the combustion chamber. "We became failure-hardened," says Mohammed Mulsim, head of the cryogenic project at that time. "After each failure we went back not to the Russian engines but to the drawing board." They succeeded finally in 2002. The indigenous cryogenic engine was qualified in 2003. It took another four years to integrate it with the GSLV. But the first flight failed in 2010, as the engine shut down three seconds after ignition.

ISRO then conducted a thorough review of the entire GSLV project. For the cryogenic engine, special vacuum testing facilities were created at Mahendragiri. By 2013 end, every likely cause of failure was looked into. A few days before the GSLV flew on January 5, ISRO officials conducted a review meeting to clear the vehicle for launch. Such meetings usually take several hours. This one ended in 45 minutes. Every possibility had been analysed, and project leaders were quietly confident.

When it flew, the GSLV put the satellite into orbit with a precision never possible with the Russian engines. "We took a long time to develop the engine," says ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, "but all countries took 10-15 years to develop cryogenic technology." ISRO now has to develop a more powerful engine, to put a 4-tonne satellite into geosynchronous orbit. The older generation that led the first cryogenic engine development has retired. It has been such a long journey, it gave the younger generation now in command a deep understanding of cryogenic technology. And they have long stints left in ISRO.

The scientists have done so much hard work, proud of them all. Give this country the resources which western countries have, and we will reach the glory just like in past with countless inventions.

The Americans pressurised the Russians into reneging on the deal, saying its engines will be used for nuclear missiles.

Typical control freaks.

 

[Great Sachin]

ISRO role is beyond space tech.....

ISRO motivates every Indian to do succeed in life. ISRO encourages students to take science and they dream to become ISRO scientist....

Thank you ISRO to inspire entire generation of India ....

 

[indiatester]

Yeah did we not test those in Lab? Basically saying this is first end to end and has reason to celebrate.

Even the other two development flights launched satellites. Consider those as beta test versions and this one the released version.

 

[CorporateAffairs]

Can this technology be useful for ICBMs?

 

[Nilgiri]

Can this technology be useful for ICBMs?

Having to fuel before launch would make the system vulnerable.

Solid fuel or regular non cryo liquid fuels are much better for ICBM.

 

[MilSpec]

@Star Wars @Armani @egodoc222 @trident2010 @punit @anant_s @Soumitra @AnnoyingOrange Hey guys, thanks for the ball by ball coverage from lift off to the success, enjoyed reading it thoroughly.

 

[Acknowledge]

Wrecked temporarily.

Fun to have the last laugh.

You missed the point.

The idea of US was not to stop the work, it was to delay it. Even US knows it cannot permanently stop a technology from developing.

That gave US time to incubate US based space launch companies which are doing great stuff. Had we done GSLV one decade back, we would have cornered the market by now.