Disclosing this to reporters at the ‘Satish Dhawan Space Centre’ here on Wednesday, Isro Chairman K Radhakrishnan said the next GSLV flight would be with an indigenously built cryogenic stage engine and all groundwork for it were on in full swing. He also inaugurated a new 'Media Centre' in the campus.
Before the GSLV flight, there will be two more launches of the ‘Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)’ from here, namely PSLV-C19, that will carry a microwave remote sensing satellite (RiSat) and ‘PSLV-C20’, which will put into orbit another Indo-French satellite- ‘Saral’-for ocean studies, he said. The launch of GSLV with indigenous cryogenic engine has been Isro’s biggest challenge on date. Having learnt from its earlier GSLV crash, two Isro scientists Dr Veeraraghavan and Dr Ramakrishnan added that the debacle had been traced to a basic failure in the ‘fuel booster turbo pump’ in December 2010.
Now, the booster pump had been redesigned and tests on the pump had been successful , they said. The ‘flight engine assembly’ of the cryogenic stage engine was now going on, and one more ‘long duration test’ for the booster pump would be carried out by October-end, they added.