India building space shuttle
India is working towards realising its dream - to create a re-usable satellite launch vehicle. An engineering model of what scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) call the re-usable launch vehicle, is currently housed at a secure and secret facility in Kerala. Covered with special heat resistant tiles, soon it will roar skywards. A reusable launch system (or reusable launch vehicle, RLV) is a launch system which is capable of launching a launch vehicle into space more than once. This contrasts with expendable launch systems, where each launch vehicle is launched once and then discarded. The news about Indian Space Shuttle is not new. In the end of 1980s and beginning of 1990s India had plans to develop the small Space Shuttle named Hyperplane that would to be orbited by non-reusable launchers. Then plans differed to project Avatar RLV as a single-stage system.AVATAR (Aerobic Vehicle for Hypersonic Aerospace TrAnspoRtation) is a single-stage reusable spaceplane ...