Indian nuclear capable ICBM missiles fail at launch

While all eyes were on the Dear Leader letting off fireworks in the DPRK, India was attempting to launch their heaviest satellite on a GEO rocket.

The launch ended in a huge fireball of smoke and flames seconds after lift-off Monday. dealing a crippling blow to the country's ambitious space programme.

The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), in which there has been considerable Russian engineering input, blasted off at 1205 GMT from an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh, cartwheeled and blew up seconds later in clear view at a cost of Euros 26 Mn.

"A mishap happened in the first stage of the separation and it will be some time before we know what went wrong," Madhavan Nair, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman, told reporters at the launch site.

Disaster struck for Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) less than a day after an unsuccessful test flight of India's Agni-III nuclear-capable missile which has a range of 4,000 kilometres (2,480 miles) and designed to arm New Delhi with a ballistic weapon.

The 49-metre (161-foot) GSLV on this flight carried a 2,168-kilogram (2.4 tonne) satellite to be put into stationary orbit at 36,000 kilometres (22,320 miles) and programmed to boost television services for the next 10 years.

It was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal. A similar GSLV successfully placed a satellite in orbit in 2004.

Initial reports said that preliminary data identified problems in the 2 stage separation process in both the 2 stage Agni (Fire) (see pic) and the three-stage GSLV as the principal problem.

Officials were gamely stiff lipped about the failures, "There has been a setback but the scale of the setback should be placed in context because countries before India who have embarked upon satellite launch business too have gone through a similar learning curve," said one.

U.R. Rao, former chief of the Space Commission, said it was a "mishap," not a setback.

It is reported that India has plans to invest US $542 Mn.to handle up to four launch services for satellites a year. There are curently nine other Indian communication satellites with a total of 175 transponders in operation, making it the largest domestic communication satellite system in the Asia-Pacific and the world's biggest civilian cluster of remote-sensing satellites.