Western policies may slow growth
India shows off space prowess with launch of a mega rocket
INDIA’S most powerful homegrown rocket to date is set to launch Monday, another milestone for its indigenous space programme that one day hopes to put a man into orbit.
The 43-metre rocket is scheduled to lift off just before 5:30 pm from the southern island of Sriharikota, one of two sites used by the Indian Space Research Organisation to launch satellites.
This latest model boasts a powerful engine that has been developed in India over many years. Programme managers hope the technology will reduce reliance on European engines that have propelled some of India’s spacecraft in the past.
The GSLV Mk III rocket will carry a satellite weighing more than 3 tonnes into a high orbit above Earth, a landmark achievement as India had struggled to match the heavier payloads of other space giants.
“This is an important moment in India’s space technology to launch an indigenous heavy rocket,” Ajay Lele from the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses said. “Communication satellites are quite heavy and we were able to send up to 2 tonnes previously. This is a double quantum jump for India.”
A successful launch of the 640-tonne rocket will be another feather in the cap for scientists at ISRO, who won Asia’s race to Mars in 2014 when an Indian spacecraft reached the Red Planet on a shoe-string budget.
That feat carved out India’s reputation as a reliable lowcost option for space exploration, with its $73 million price tag drastically undercutting NASA’s Maven Mars $671-million mission.
ISRO is also mulling the idea of missions to Jupiter and Venus.
India is vying for a larger slice of the booming commercial satellite business as phone, internet and other companies seek greater and more highend communications.
In February, India put a record 104 satellites in orbit from a single rocket, surpassing Russia which launched 39 satellites in one mission in June 2014.
The rocket’s main cargo was a 714-kilogram satellite for Earth observation but it was also loaded with 103 smaller “nano satellites”, nearly all from other countries.
Although India has successfully launched lighter satellites in recent years, this latest rocket is capable of carrying a massive four-tonne payload into high orbit – twice the capacity of its predecessor, ISRO says.
The space agency tested a less-developed version of the rocket in December 2014 while the cryogenic engine was still in the testing phase.
It carried an unmanned crew capsule which separated from the rocket and splashed down in the Bay of Bengal off India’s east coast 20 minutes after liftoff.
The Indian-made capsule was designed to carry up to three astronauts but ISRO said the project would take at least another seven years to reach the point where a crew could be put into space.
India wants to become the fourth nation – after Russia, the US and China – to put astronauts into orbit but its manned spaceflight programme has seen multiple stops and starts. LONG-TERM growth prospects for developing economies, including Cambodia, will continue to be undermined by a lack of investment as well as the risk of increased protectionist policies by the United States, which could hamper the growth of commodity-driven economies, according to a new report released on Sunday.
In the World Bank’s latest forecast for East Asia and Pacific, economists said that despite a modest growth in the region that has dampened the weight of a Chinese slowdown, heightened policy uncertainty coming out of Washington, fiscal policies that are under review in Europe and the exit of Britain from the European Union “carries risks that could weigh on investor confidence”.
The report said that with the United States reassessing a number of existing trade agreements, including its exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, revisions of these agreements would “disproportionately” hurt countries in the region.
“Changing trade policies would di s propor t i onatel y affect the more open economies in the East Asia and Pacific region, especially those with sizable exports to advanced economies, [for example] Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam,” the economists said.
In addition, the report added that any significant disruption in Chinese exports would also undermine growth with large regional spillover effects.
Despite the external uncertainty, the World Bank kept its gross domestic product projections for Cambodia that it first released in January for 2017 and 2018, at a stable 6.9 percent growth rate. However, it lowered 2019 projections by 0.1 percent to 6.7 percent.
Overall, however, the World Bank painted an optimistic picture for global growth announcing that it would accelerate to 2.7 percent this year with developing economies as a whole growing at 4.1 percent compared with 3.5 percent in 2016.
“With a fragile but real recovery now underway, countries should seize this moment to undertake institutional and market reforms that can attract private investment to help sustain growth in the longterm,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.