Major Milestone For Country's Manned Space Program

India's Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced Monday it has safely deorbited and recovered a capsule launched on January 10 from a facility north of the city of Chennai. The capsule was one of four payloads aboard the rocket and was part of an effort by the country to develop a manned spaceflight program.

The 1,210 pound Space Capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE) spent 11 days in orbit before splashing down in the Bay of Bengal yesterday. (The above picture was taken during capsule recovery testing -- it's not from the actual SRE recovery).

A. Subramoniam, head of the team that designed and built the capsule at ISRO, told the Sydney Morning Herald, "[It] landed in the Bay of Bengal ... as per schedule. The mission is a great success [and] a stepping stone to design and build our very own reusable spacecraft, and eventually [carry out] manned missions into space, too."

India's space agency has built and orbited communications and remote-sensing satellites for years, but this mission marks a first attempt at deploying a reusable spacecraft.

India's home-grown Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle -- dubbed PSLV-C7 -- carried the capsule aloft along with an Indian mapping satellite, an Indonesian earth observation satellite and an Argentinian educational satellite. The four objects were lifted to a 395-mile polar orbit.

PSLV is ISRO's workhorse launch vehicle. It's a four-stage rocket using a combination of solid and liquid propellants with a total lift-off weight of nearly 300 tons. The agency boasts eight consecutive successful launches with the booster since it started service in 1994.

The SRE, whose primary mission was to aid India in developing re-entry procedures and recoverable/reusable space technologies, also carried two microgravity experiments into space and back to earth.

Although ISRO officials say the country won't likely put an astronaut in space before 2014, it says Monday's success will help the country in its preparations for a 2008 unmanned moon mission.

FMI: www.isro.org