 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we're going to discuss India's latest space launch, the GSLV Mark III. We have with us D. Raghunandad, who's been following these issues for NewsClick for quite some time. Raghunadad, good to have you with us. GSLV Mark III has been a major achievement because we have been talking about this at NewsClick in other places that India really needed a muscular launcher to be able to reach geostationary orbit with a satellite which is roughly about four tons thereabouts. The minimum required today for really commercial space launches. Do you think that GSLV Mark III puts India in this bracket? As you say, we've been talking about this for several years now through all the laudatory, self-congratulatory launches that India has done to Mars, to the moon, launching a hundred plus micro satellites. All these are very nice achievements. But if India was to be taken seriously as a commercial space launch nation, it needed to be able to launch heavy satellites, which were meant for commercial applications, particularly for communications satellites, which is where the money is and where the demand is, which meant launching satellites of about four tons plus at high enough altitudes to enable geostationary positioning of the satellites. So this has been a long time coming, but having reached there, I think it's been a milestone. What India now has to do is to have similar launches. Normally in the space launch universe, you are taken to have a reliable launch capability if the same launch vehicle repeats a success three to four times. So people would wait to see two to three successful launches of the GSLV Mark III. Then I think we will start seeing commercial interest being expressed in India's launch capability. What is a cryogenic engine? This is a third stage is the cryogenic stage. So what's a cryogenic engine? Why is it in the third stage? The third stage is where you want the boost to take your payload up to a high enough altitude and to position it correctly for geostationary function. So you need sufficient power. When you say geostationary, you've been fixed above a certain spot on earth. So that requires two sets of maneuvers. One is to position the spacecraft roughly on the equatorial plane. Only the Europeans, the Arian launch site in Guinea is virtually equatorial. Shri Harikota is not too far from the equator, but we still need to maneuver a satellite once you've launched it to get it on the equatorial plane. And other is the position of the satellite, the height and the so on. But this requires a fair amount of power. Now that power, if you're going to use solid propellants, will require a very huge weight up in space, which is why you decide to go for a liquid propellant but at very low temperatures so that you can store the fill and store the fuel and it will not weigh too much when you carry it up. And that is why the cryogenic engine has turned out to be important. Not that it is the only possible way of doing this. Why has the Indians cryogenic stage, which really started in 1998 or there about, of course, earlier work from 80s, why did it take about 19 years of time before India could stabilize? The first thing of course is that it's not a particularly easy technology to master. It is a tough one and India for a long time thought it could get this technology from the Soviet Union later from Russia and then either adapt from that technology or reverse engineer it and develop the cryogenic stage. This started developing problems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The transition to Russia which then started having a slightly different approach to technology sharing with other countries. I think the relationship between Russia and India also started changing with India looking more to the west for different technologies. All this posed a challenge. If you look at the background of this, it was the Yeltsin government which really buckled under the pressure of Clinton administration and literally sabotaged what was an existing cryogenic agreement, which was for peaceful purposes. As you know cryogenic engines are never used for missile purposes. It takes three days to fill. So therefore nobody's going to wait three days for a launch. So the fact that it was a peaceful transfer, it did not violate the what is called the missile MTCR, the control regime. All this was really not the issue. The real issue was the Americans didn't want India to be a competition space commercial launch vehicle. So the basic thing was a shift in the geopolitical environment with Russia changing its position and once the Soviet Union or Russia the successor regime earlier under Yeltsin finally gave way to the Putin regime. By that time I think it was too late because Putin's Russia started looking at technology transfer etc in very different but that is already too late. But by then it was too late. We have spent nine years trying to develop our engines. So by that time then India had invested its time and money into developing its own cryogenic engine and that is I think of interest in the GSLV Mark III is that earlier variants of India's cryogenic engine which it had been using in the GSLV Mark II were derived from earlier Russian designs. This cryogenic engine used in the GSLV Mark III is a completely indigenous design owes nothing to the earlier Russian designs and is a completely new Indian design which is I think what makes it particularly significant. So what you are saying is that if you have two or three of more such launches that India would be firmly into this communication space launch vehicle market. We have been launching our communication satellites to Darian route that's been the preferred platform for India. So who are the other players in this field and how would India be positioned with respect to more technology and cost. Well the US, the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese have such launch capabilities. Japan has launch capabilities has never really established itself as a established player in the launch market particularly in heavier satellite launches. So we are essentially talking about four players. NASA has virtually gone out of the satellite launch business now. So it's left to players like Elon Musk and others to take the ball forward. So they are playing in the market as well and Musk is playing for the low cost market by shifting to reusable rockets thereby reducing costs. So that's what his game plan is. So that leaves the Europeans and the Russians the Chinese are not really global players in the commercial space launch market. So I think India has a good slot to enter into there is sufficient demand in the market and not enough players. So if it can show reliability what you're saying is in cost terms India would get an economic advantage or the commercial advantage because it really offers cheaper launch costs. The other part of it you see a shift of possibly towards smaller satellites micro satellites and not going in for such big large satellites so that you have more number of smaller satellites but you cover the earth similarly. This is happening in different applications particularly in tracking applications. There are some of the satellites we launched in our earlier record breaking 104 satellites launch for example is a company which is using micro satellites to track any vehicle ships trucks trains whatever. So any courier cargo carrier anybody can track exactly where their cargo is going whether it's on land sea air whatever and they do that by having 100 or more micro satellites all around the earth rather than having one large satellite tracking it. So for some of these applications this works but the difficulty is in communication satellite where you want your communication satellite position just so and those communication satellites with the transponders and so on tend to be heavy which is why there is still a premium on the 4 ton class because for example about 10 years ago you would have had communication satellites in the 1 ton or 1.5 ton range but now people want with a single launch to have a much larger number of transponders up because then you can hire out the transponders to other users. So communication satellites today tend to be of the 4 ton plus range in fact many of them are today 6 tons and there is one other aspect which has been highlighted in sections of the Indian media and in the international media whose utility and potential I think we should discuss at some other time but which we can flag here at the moment is with this India has opened the door to the possibility of human launches as well. We could not have attempted to put an astronaut in space until you had this size of launch capability and apparently ISRO has already put forward a proposal to the government looking for a human launch about 8 years down the road and I think maybe at some future date we can discuss the pros and cons of this. The third stage being lower innovative music hygienic fuel and cryogenic means of course very low temperature. Thank you very much Raghu for being with us this is all the time we have today for news click keep watching news click both our youtube channel and the website