Another good day for Indian science and technology! ISRO announced today that it had successfully developed a rocket engine that uses liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen (A cryogenic engine). A cryogenic engine is important for lifting heavy loads into high orbit. Modern communications satellites sit in a Geostationary orbit and tend to be extremely heavy. Cryogenic engine technology will help ISRO put these important satellites in space efficiently without using imported cryogenic engines.
An indigenous engine was the only major missing piece in our civilian space program. All advanced space faring nations have it and now we do too! Initially the Russians were supposed to give us the technology but the Americans successfully prevented technology transfer under the MTCR (Missile Technology Control) Regime. This forced us to develop an engine or our own. It was supposed to have taken 7 yrs or so but its taken about 17! Then again, better late than never!
Cryogenic engine are very hard to build and very few nations (the EU, America, Japan, Russia, China, India) have this technology. Why is it so hard? Consider this: Liquid Hydrogen is at -252 C, Liquid Oxygen is at -182 C. When they burn to combine water, the temperatures are in the thousands of degrees. The engine itself is rotating at about 30,000 RPM! Imagine the stresses of extreme temperatures and rotation on the engine components! All this while the rocket is accelerating linearly to achieve a speed greater that ~10 KM/second (!) to escape the earth’s gravitational field.
For me, this story has been a roller coaster ride. Every year there were a couple of articles on the engine being either successfully or unsuccessfully tested. No one never really knew how long this testing would continue. The project was beginning to feel like something the DRDO did (witness the delays in the Arjun tank and Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme). But finally, that wait has now come to an end. Yesterday, Chairman of ISRO, Mr. Nair said quite satisfyingly:
Now we are confident that we will be able to develop cryogenic engines with higher thrusts for use in the next stage of GSLV. This successful test was the result of the dedicated development work of our scientists for the last 10 years. So far we had been depending on Russia for the upper cryogenics stage. Now we will be able to do it on our own. This is a great milestone in our journey towards self-reliance in space science. (Hindu Newspaper, 17th Nov, 2007)
The next step is to use the ground validated engine in a rocket. This will happen in 2008. A caveat: We wont be able to truly say that we have cryogenic engine capability until a successful flight is completed. I’ll be waiting.
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