 Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to tomorrow. This week I wanted to talk about a small step in achieving a reusable space shuttle by the Indian Research Space Organization, ISRO. They have a technology demonstrator mission that will hopefully be launching this month. This is your space pod for May 18, 2016. So India has been working over the past 15 years, but more seriously over the past five years to develop a reusable space shuttle, but one that will deliver satellites similar to the X-37B, but one day they hope to upscale the vehicle and human-rate it to be able to carry astronauts. Their program is going to go through several different phases of testing before major operations can begin. The first vehicle, which is tentatively scheduled to launch on May 23rd, is called the Reusable Launch Vehicle Test Demonstrator, and I believe its actual name is Swadeshi, although some people call it Avatar. That's incorrect though, because Avatar is an Indian military project that's being done by the Indian Research and Development Organization. So I think its name is Swadeshi if it even has any other name other than Reusable Launch Vehicle. This first test launch is under the experimental phase called HEX, which stands for Hypersonic Flight Experiment. Because its first flight will be a suborbital flight to 70 kilometers and achieve speeds up to Mach 6. The vehicle isn't designed for anything more than that, so if it goes faster it'll be ripped apart. The vehicle has a delta wing, which is covered in heat shield tiles, to protect it from the forces of re-entry. And in the future it will be able to deploy satellites from a cargo bay, although this vehicle doesn't have a cargo bay, and the whole point of this flight is to test to make sure that they have the right design for all the different aerodynamics, and that it will be able to survive re-entry. The reusable launch vehicle will be lofted by a modified inline solid rocket booster, the HS9, which is based on the S9 boosters used on the PSLV rocket. And it has a different mixture ratio and will burn much longer than the 70 seconds that the SRBs usually fire for. This will allow the vehicle to reach its intended height and speed. When the vehicle re-enters, it's going to do a virtual landing over the Bay of Bengal. What that means is it's going to glide onto the water and sink. The reason for this is because they don't have a runway long enough to receive the vehicle. They do plan to build one near the launch site on Trihara Kota Island, near the Satish Dwahon Space Center, which would be similar to the Shuttle Landing Facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. But as the time of me filming this video, I don't have any information as to when they plan to build that runway. So if you guys have any information on that, please let me know. However, once they have a runway, they're going to be able to move on to their next phase of development, which is called lex, or landing experiment, which would see the same type of flight profile, except the vehicle, I think, would be able to turn around and then glide to the runway at the landing. Then the next phase of the testing would be wrecks or return to flight experiments. And what this would be would be testing to see if their hardware is actually reusable. So whatever vehicle is recovered during their lex experiments would be flown again for the lex experiments, and hopefully that all goes well. Finally, the last experimental phase would be to give the Shuttle its own propulsion. And the type of propulsion that they want to give it is an air-breathing scramjet. And in India, they've actually been testing scramjets for a couple of years, although I don't know enough about their scramjet program to have an opinion as to whether it will be successful or not. I know that we've been testing scramjets in the United States for several years with varying levels of success, but like I said, I don't know enough about their program to know if it will be successful. But if it is successful, it will be really important to allow the vehicle to cruise to its runway landing, especially once they start doing orbital launches with this vehicle. In any case, for the mission taking place this month, which is actually at Chiharikota right now being integrated for launch, I wish everyone at ISRO success and that this mission goes off without a hitch, that they're able to get all the data that they need and are able to proceed onward with this program. And I really hope it works. So what do you think about this? Do you think that ISRO will be successful? Do you think that they need a vehicle like this? Also, do you think that they might abandon their plans for having an orbital crew capsule in favor of an orbital crew shuttle? 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So again, thank you so much and also thank you for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark and hopefully you know just a little bit more today than you did yesterday thanks to Tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.