India recently completed a series of tests aimed at demonstrating homegrown technology for autonomously landing its reusable launch vehicle, agency officials said in a recent news release.
The milestone gets the country another step closer to its goal of operating such a vehicle end-to-end within this decade, the technology for which can be adapted to its fleet of launch vehicles for multiple uses across missions in a more cost-effective manner.
The latest demonstration, which was the third and final
RLV Landing Experiment (LEX), was carried out by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on June 23, 2024 in a government-owned outdoor testing facility in Karnataka, a state in southern India. The space plane, named
Pushpak, "executed a precise horizontal landing, showcasing advanced autonomous capabilities under challenging conditions," the space agency said in a
recent post on X. "With the objectives of RLV LEX accomplished, ISRO embarks into RLV [orbital reuse vehicle]," which aims to fly the prototype into space for an autonomous return.
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