India launches mega-rocket

Dragon arrives at ISS

NEW DELHI, June 5, (AFP): India Monday successfully launched its most powerful home-produced rocket, another milestone for its indigenous space programme which one day hopes to put a human into orbit.

The 43-metre (140-foot) rocket hurtled into a clear sky at 5:28 pm (1158 GMT) from the southern island of Sriharikota, one of two sites used by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to launch satellites.

Scientists hugged each other and cheered as the 640-tonne rocket lifted off. “The GSLV — MKIII D1/GSAT19 mission takes India closer to the next generation launch vehicle and satellite capability,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on his Twitter account. “The nation is proud!” The rocket boasts a powerful engine that has been developed in India over many years. Programme managers hope to reduce reliance on European engines that have propelled some of India’s spacecraft in the past.

The GSLV Mk III rocket carried a satellite weighing more than three tonnes into a high orbit above Earth, a landmark achievement as India had struggled to match the heavier payloads of other space giants.

“They just launched the most powerful engine in India. It is a cryogenic engine, which took them 20 years to develop. Some engineers have spent their life working on this,” Mathieu Weiss, a representative in India for France’s space agency CNES, told AFP.

The launch is 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 shoestring budget.

That feat burnished India’s reputation as a reliable low-cost option for space exploration, with its $73 million price

But he prefaced that remark by saying, “the United States is not backing down from its role as a leader in cleaning up the climate.”

Earlier Monday, Perry told his Japanese 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 expanded and more high-end 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.

Loaded

The rocket’s main cargo on that occasion was a 714-kilogram (1,574-pound) 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 lessdeveloped 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 it 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 United States and China — to put astronauts into orbit but its manned spaceflight programme has experienced multiple

counterpart, Hiroshige Seko, that the US commitment to the environment is unchanged, according to Kazushige Tanaka, a Japanese industry ministry official who was at their meeting.

In this Nov 9, 2015 photo, workers set up a ladder near a wind turbine power generator at a Goldwind wind turbine factory in Beijing. Increasing amounts of green energy have gone unused in China as it struggles to integrate wind and

solar power into a dated electricity network dominated by coal. (AP)

stops and starts.

MIAMI:

Also:

SpaceX’s first-ever recycled spaceship arrived Monday at the International Space Station, two days after the unmanned Dragon cargo capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Live images on NASA television showed the spaceship approaching the orbiting outpost, then being grabbed with the station’s robotic arm at 9:52 am (1352 GMT).

“Capture complete,” said NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who operated the robotic arm from inside the station.

The spaceship is carrying almost 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of science research, crew supplies and hardware.

It was originally flown on SpaceX’s fourth resupply mission in 2014.

Its arrival makes it the first US spaceship to return to the space station since the American space shuttle program ended in 2011.

The latest mission is SpaceX’s 11th cargo resupply trip to the ISS under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA.

“We also want to note the special significance of SpaceX 11, which if we followed the naming convention of the artist Prince, could be called ‘The SpaceX formerly known as SpaceX 4,’” quipped NASA astronaut Jack Fischer as he spoke to mission control in Houston.

“We have a new generation of vehicles now, led by commercial partners like SpaceX, as they build the infrastructure that will carry us into the future of exploration,” he said.

“Now we’d better get back to work. We have a lot of stuff to unload.”

SpaceX is working on a version of its Dragon capsule that will carry crew to the space station, perhaps as early as next year.

Perry said the United States, as it has led the effort in tackling carbon reduction and clean coal technology, will continue to be a leader in developing clean energy and technology. AP)

Kerry, Gore blast Trump:

Former US secretary of state John Kerry, an architect of the Paris climate accord, Sunday blasted President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement to cut carbon emissions.

“When Donald Trump says to the world, well, we’re going to negotiate a better deal... that’s like O.J. Simpson saying he’s going to find the real killer,” Kerry said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” alluding to the former American football star who was controversially acquitted of killing his former wife.

Trump, he said, is not going to renegotiate the treaty despite suggesting he might do so “because he doesn’t believe in it. If you did believe it, you wouldn’t pull out of Paris.”

Kerry, who threw his full weight behind the agreement when it was adopted in 2015, bitterly criticized Trump’s unilateral decision to pull out of it.

“America has unilaterally ceded global leadership on this issue, which for years even Republican presidents ... pushed in this direction.” (AFP)