Very impressive, but It's not a fully reusable rocket (in the SpaceX sense), but it looks more like a reusable ship, like the columbia space shuttle.
> May 23, 2016 ISRO successfully flight tested India’s first winged body aerospace vehicle operating in hypersonic flight regime.
> In this experimental mission, the HS9 solid rocket booster carrying RLV-TD lifted off from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota at 07:00hr IST. After a successful flight of 91.1second, HS9 burn out occurred, following which both HS9 and RLV-TD mounted on its top coasted to a height of about 56 km. At that height, RLV-TD separated from HS9 booster and further ascended to a height of about 65km
So the solid rocket booster, HS9, wasn't reusable.
What looks more interesting to me is:
> The vehicle’s Navigation, Guidance and Control system accurately steered the vehicle during this phase for safe descent
In fact, on July 19, 1963, Joseph Albert Walker flew an X-15 rocket plane to an altitude of 105,900m, or more than 100km, past the Kárman line, i.e. into outer space. Compare that to the Indian flight mentioned in this article, which reached an altitude of 65km. In other words, the US had a reuseable space-capable launch vehicle 50 years ago.
"Mostly" is quite a stretch, since the shuttle is completely dependent not only only the fuel in the external tank, but also on the solid rocket boosters. Indeed, the solid boosters composed the majority of the launch weight and provided the majority of the thrust. For the first couple of minutes, the shuttle was mostly just along for the ride (just as the X-37 is completely along for the ride on the Atlas).
The key analogous role I'm referring to is the ability to deploy, capture, and return payloads to Earth, which is shared by the X-37 and the shuttle. It's not a coincidence that the Air Force developed the X-37 when the shuttle retired.
A very HN correction here but 'space shuttle' refers to the whole stack (orbiter and fel tank and SRBs) and what you seem to be referring to as the 'space shuttle' is actually called the orbiter, a component of the space shuttle. But everyone gets it wrong. Mobile makes it difficult to add links but its explained on the wikipedia article for the space shuttle orbiter, a distinct article from the space shuttle.
Could you elaborate on what you think the current deployment of the X-37 has to do timeline wise with the cancellation of the shuttle program?
After Challenger the Air Force cancelled its plan to use the shuttle for satellites and opted instead for more conventional boosters.
I can't remember whether it was after Challenger or Columbia but didn't NASA also stop returning payloads from orbit from safety reasons after one of those disasters?
I'm sure the Air Force is using the X-37 for something, although they're not saying what, but I don't see how whatever it is has to do with the timeline of the cancellation of the shuttle program.
I know that the Air Force began publicly working on the predecessor (X-40) in 1998 (between the Challenger '86 and Columbia '03 disasters). Presumably they were working secretly even earlier. Also, the X-37's first orbital flight was in 2010 and the shuttle's retirement was in 2011. But that's all I know, and mine is uninformed speculation. Apologies if I expressed too much confidence.
As per current plans, this winged body will be the first stage of a future TSTO (two stage to orbit) launch vehicle. This winged body first stage will have cryo/kerolox engines for vertical takeoff, and scramjet engine for gliding down and landing on an airstrip after stage separation. This prototype was intended to test aerodynamics of winged body at Mach 5+ speeds and to evaluate flight control and navigation systems.
Right now it's more comparable to the X-37B. It's not quite clear what the further steps are going to be, India has floated a lot of concepts and seems to be still figuring out which can be pursued further.
This test is a part of ISRO's next gen "two stage to orbit" (TSTO) launch vehicle.
First stage of TSTO will have delta wings and scramjet engine for landing. Second stage will have parachutes for landing[0].
The winged body that was tested two months ago will be the first stage of TSTO. In this experiment, ISRO tested aerodynamics and flight control systems of this delta-winged body at hypersonic speeds.
In the next experiment (scheduled on July), ISRO will be testing the scramjet engine.
No, they demonstrated the capability of developing one at some point in the future. The test article isn't even capable of reaching orbit, or returning from orbit, or landing yet.
This is the easy step – comparable to the American X-15, X-23, ASSET, and SpaceShipOne projects, the Russian BOR-1 to -6 or ESA's IXV demonstrator –, turning this into a Space Shuttle / Buran / X-37b style actual space plane will be a long, expensive undertaking.
And, as the Space Shuttle demonstrated, "recoverable" and "reusable" are two different beasts: The Shuttle's engines returned to Earth, but were so burned out from each launch that they required a refurbishment 80% as expensive as a whole new engine, and only managed an average of 5 launches even with that – planned were 55 flights without major refurbishments.
It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX, in case anyone is wondering: This is the upper stage portion that goes into orbit, and needs a booster to get into (or close to) orbit first. Those can be more expensive than the actual plane, depending on the design:
• The X-37b launches atop an Atlas rocket, and its expensive stages are completely lost.
• ESA's Hermes was supposed to launch on the similarly fully expendable Ariane 5.
For regular satellite launches, you don't save much money with these designs – since you don't need to return the orbital part anyway, you can just launch the Atlas/Ariane without the expensive plane on top and still come out cheaper. It's mainly relevant for manned programmes, which is why the Hermes was cancelled (since ESA's manned programme never got the necessary funding) and Ariane 5 just launched without, and why the X-37b is restricted to classified launches that probably involve returning things back to Earth (which is where space planes really shine!).
And even for manned programs, space planes don't necessarily lead to cost savings:
• The Space Shuttle put all expensive parts – engines, avionics, and so on – into the orbiter, and only the big external tank burned up. The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment (unlike the main engines). If the engines and heat shield hadn't been such massive failures, it might have worked out to be reasonably cheap in the long run. Alas. The way it turned out, it was a ridiculous money sink.
• The Russians, as always, decided to out-crazy everyone and put engines on the Buran orbiter, even more and even bigger engines on the external tank, oh and let's use four boosters instead of two. And make those liquid-fueled, so that each side booster is as complex as a smaller rocket on its own (and can be used as such). To everyone's surprise, this bankrupted the Buran program. There were plans to put foldable wings on the side boosters and orbiter-style delta wings and heat shields on the external tanks and turn everything into UAVs that automatically land on runways after detaching, but the Soviet Union preferred dissolution over funding any of that.
> And even for manned programs, space planes don't necessarily lead to cost savings
Mitchell Burnside Clapp had a somewhat innovative idea in that rather than deal with all those expensive expendable boosters you could add a little more mass to the actual launch vehicle and then use high altitude in-flight refueling.
I'm not keen on any sort of space plane or similar idea.
The main issue is the forces acting on the vehicle along multiple axes.
For a VTVL rocket like the Falcon 9, there is just one main axis along which acceleration and load-bearing is going through: straight up and down.
For a space plane, you have at least two. One along the thrust line, and another when it is supporting itself on the ground and in flight. So now you have to reinforce the structure more, which adds a lot of weight.
And that's disregarding the thermal protection system which is more complicated too.
>The test article isn't even capable of reaching orbit, or returning from orbit, or landing yet.
>It's also different from reusable boosters as developed by SpaceX ... Those can be more expensive than the actual plane
You misunderstand. The capabilities ISRO demonstrated today are for developing a reusable first stage (booster), not a reusable second stage.
>The solid boosters were also recovered, but since they were just steel tubes, they didn't require much refurbishment
They also contained thrust vectoring equipment on the rear. All those actuators, controllers, etc had to be completely disassembled, cleaned, inspected, reassembled, and recertified after being fished out of the ocean.
Like the Shuttle, the SRBs were more expensive to refurbish than an expendable design would have been.
Has anyone noticed how everything of value out of India is only in English (the other lang link is blank) ? This sort of thing would be anathema in China; what with all the 'millenium of humiliation' and things. Odd, considering the general indignance showed towards @pmarca (from @a16z) some months back.
Honestly, its the consensus language, since its already is the commercial language of the world. Knowledge and fluency in English is the basic for cultural and professional sophistication (in India). India during the moguls had similar thing with farsi. BJP(current ruling party) want to impose Hindi, but primarily South and East peripheries have strong linguistic identities usually are not comfortable, so English is the happy compromise.
Interesting. I noticed that ISRO is actually in the south; it'd appear that neither the north nor the south have any linguistic identity. (To wit, the French speak English to get on with fellow Europeans but everything important out of France is usually in French. Ditto in Japan.)
I've noticed this in Kenya (and Africa in general) as well. People say they're against European imperialism, but really they're not, considering how the state holds what was injected in higher esteem than whatever is native. It seems that most of the indignance pointed to at @pmarca is about (white) guilt shaming.
Paulson from yesterday should be glad to hear of this heretic analysis :)
> considering how the state holds what was injected in higher esteem than whatever is native. It seems that most of the indignance pointed to at @pmarca is about (white) guilt shaming.
If I understand your logic correctly, it seems that you are suggesting that a country or a community should either reinvent every useful thing that was introduced by colonialists or should not take a stand against the ideas of colonialism, racism and discrimination!
It's a fact that Britishers introduced a lot of technology in this world and helped bring it to many countries but I feel that it would have been much better if they would have tried to integrate with these countries rather than trying to follow a master-slave approach. Anyways, what's done is done but we can certainly hope that going forward the world can be a more equal place.
Technological/economic structures are separate from cultural spheres; most countries follow a Western model today. It'd have been a great loss if during Meiji period Japan lost all its culture.
I'm sure you sensed the sarcasm, but forgive me, I don't think a country which produced Panini, needed the English to teach it to speak.
Is this strange "stockholm syndrome" a result of the country's caste system ? Does everyone in India speak English ? If not, is there a linguistic class/caste divide (like South Africa) ?
I do not really understand how learning a language is equated to supporting colonialism. Nor does learning English imply abandoning local languages. Almost everyone in India who speaks English is also fluent in one or more Indian languages. I for one have fluency in 3 Indian languages.
Criticizing @pmarca on his comments on colonialism has got less to do with his race and more to do with the contents of his comments. I am certain that a person of any other race or ethnicity making such a comment would have received similar criticism (and rightfully so).
I don't see how the choice of a language that is practically the lingua franca of the modern technology and business world is related to being against the ideology of colonialism and people who support that.
In my opinion, India's adoption of English as standard language of business is a logical choice as it is not only helpful in faster technological progress of the country but is also understood (in some capacity) by majority of the population.
I don't think you understand what 'lingua franca' means. No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.
India is not exactly on the same stage globally as China or Japan, when it comes to Tech, despite what you claim.
It looks like http://www.aliexpress.com/ has support for more Indian languages than Flipkart. Surely supporting different languages for such a unicorn (which often shows up on HN) can't be that difficult a task ?
>No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.
It's not giving up the languages if we were to find a logical(because the rest of the world speaks this too) common medium to speak.
And,
I am amazed as to how you are trying to connect dots from 'you guys speak English, so you have to also support colonialism, if not, you are hypocrites and pmarca is right'.
None of the countries you named were ruled or for that matter created by a colonial ruler with another language. India in its current form never existed, its like the EU, there are several states with their own languages, and English is the common one.
As for Aliexpress offering several languages - its just the google translate plugin ;).
India in its current form never existed, its like the EU
This is technically true in that yes, a state with precisely India's borders today did not exist before 1947. But that is a useless claim because that is true for every country in the world.
There are have been many many empires, going back all the way back at least 2300 years, and these empires have ruled the majority of the Indian subcontinent. This includes most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan. Some of them also ruled parts of Iran, Tibet, and a little bit of Central Asia. And these empires all had linguistic diversity. The idea that one language = one country is a stupid byproduct of European nationalist movements.
Fun fact: People who actually don't speak fluent English are more often than not ridiculed, looked down upon and judged immediately. For some reason, the country treats knowing english as a litmus test - You either know english or you're not really that knowledgable (You've to work doubly hard to prove your knowledge).
I might be generalizing a bit but it's truly a widespread thing, I'm sure other Indian HN users can attest to this.
- You try to strike a conversation with a girl in Hindi in a bar, you will get laughed at or ignored. But you speak fluent english and you have a much higher chance of having a conversation.
- Every parent wants to send their child to an english medium school and it's only the poor ones who don't have many options around who settle for their children to be in a local language school (The quality of teachers would also vary accordingly).
- A sportsperson (usually a cricketer), goes up to the post-match presentation to take an award and speaks in broken english, millions of people watching it would start cracking jokes on him.
There are countless other examples. Yes, knowing english is good to compete in a global economy but the obsession with the language that the middle/upper class shows is ridiculous. There are several reasons for this trend but it's definitely a direct impact of the British rule.
There is a brilliant Bollywood family movie on this topic - English Vinglish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2181931/)
I would really recommend you to watch it if you're into good foreign cinema.
The problems you point out are real, but they are the problems of class differences. India has a growing middle class, and this class needs markers to differentiate itself from the lower classes it has only recently left behind. Speaking English acts as a marker now, but if it went away for some reason I'm sure there would be new markers to take its place. Think of the kind of ‘Indian’ culture promoted by the government and the schools: Indian classical music, Indian classical dance, Sanskritised Hindi. They are as alien to the everyday lives of most people in India as English is. But they were created to give the elites and the government of India a high culture of their own which was not tainted by colonialism and whose command they could use to differentiate themselves from the non-elite.
The bar situation has an additional twist. Most bilingual people I know would use the Indian language with friends and family and English with strangers. So trying to start a conversation in Hindi may come across as being too familiar too soon.
It almost appears as if there is a class of Indians who learn English first and then barely, if at all, learn any of the native languages. I wonder if the similar GDP per-capita of India, Africa are the result of such shared colonial baggage.
I've never seen this stuff never mentioned in the media; I had know about the colonial education/stifling wartime British bureaucracy etc. and assorted ideas from reading Naipaul's book. I didn't think it was this bad.
I find it ironic that such elites hold the values of enlightenment Europe to such high standard while implementing the policies of medieval Europe. Best of luck to you; considering the boisterous opposition here, I can only imagine what it'd take to bring political change in such a vast country.
India was completely conquered and ruled by the British for a century or two. China was defeated militarily many times, but was never really conquered, and wasn't colonized aside from a few places like Hong Kong and bits of Shanghai. That's a huge difference in circumstance which I'm sure results in a huge difference in attitudes.
China also had an authoritarian government willing to impose Beijing Mandarin as the standard language for the whole country. I don't know that India's government would have been willing or able to do something similar.
In India, the north primarily speaks Hindi, with dialects of Hindi being spoken by state (Punjabi, Bhojpuri etc). South India's language (and where ISRO is primarily situated) speaks a variety of languages including Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam etc. So English becomes the neutral language when communication is required between the two halves.
On the a16z note, do you mean the Marc Andreessen's colonial comments? I don't remember any squabble with a16z and Indians as a whole.
There many languages with multiple scripts. Konkani is written in both Kannada and Devanagari. Manipuri is written in both Manipuri and Bengali.
For a more controversial example, I'd say maybe Urdu/Hindi are basically the same language written in Devanagari or Urdu. (btw, I just looked at Shahmukhi on wikipedia and it is exactly the same as Urdu).
Not uniquely: Serbo-Croatian is written in Latin or Cyrillic depending what country you are in. Turkish is now officially written in Latin, but used to be written in Arabic. And most prominently, though in a different way, Chinese and Japanese have multiple writing systems.
Okay folk. I understand HN crowd (and apparently the Indian subset too) don't like hearing ill of the British empire. I concede that everything was/is well and that English is the only "rational" choice for every affair in India. Naipaul was right after all; I didn't think this nostalgia was this great, though.
The spiritual center of my culture is apparently long dead; I don't really care about what they do over there anymore.
You seem really confused. India uses English because we have 28 official languages. English is seen as neutral. Indians nor most other Asians have any love for the British. Rejecting English does not repair the damage they did. And attaching nationalism to the rejection of English is just childish.
And if you wanted to bring up this up, I don't see why you had to use Marc Andressen to bring it up. And asking for votes after mis understanding and then mis representing people's points is not going to get you any up votes.
Either offer a rational counter argument, or concede that your comments were poorly thought through. Hiding behind Naipaul's comments does not further the argument in anyway.
No one here is arguing that English is the ONLY rational choice, nor is it in reality. India has 18 official languages. English is just one of them.
Okay. I can't spend so much time explaining the virtues of "freedom". I also can't spend time trying to reason with "rational" people who like all the post-modernists basically believe in narratives, and not truth (philosophically speaking).
- My contention is not about speaking English, "rational" people (I speak English!). It is about how economically dominant a language is; in East Asia/Europe getting a good job without knowing the local language is extraordinarily difficult. Speaking English (without other awesome skills) often lands one a position teaching high schoolers.
- This power/economic structure is inverted in formerly colonized African nations as noted by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. He was kicked out for raising such questions (so much for Kenyan Independence).
- It's very apparent that this is the case in India too.
Why?
- It doesn't look like one can get a Tech job at ISRO (imaginably also Flipkart) having a Engineering degree in one of the native languages. What appears to be Hindi is barely to be found on the menus on its front page.
A "lingua franca" is one to which everyone makes a translation from the original, for the world to read. It appears that the original itself is in English, here!
- This being the case, I'm not even sure if you can get a degree in anything useful in any of the native languages.
- There seems to be lots of chatter in the search results on an as yet unnamed invisible hand disenfranchising people linguistically (people are taught in English ??!).
- According to Wiki, only 10% of India speaks English.
This is the classic workings of a feudal - ironically a pre-enlightenment - state, if not one practicing outright apartheid.
It's almost as if India stepped into medieval Europe's shoes where the rich sent their kids to Latin grammar schools; or Tsarist Russia where French was the langue de l'élite (atleast Tolstoy wrote in Russian as noted by the NyT article!).
If you want to invalidate my understanding, either show one of the above to false, or show why it's alright by making statements about their benignity (vis a vis a linguistically diverse EU, for instance). Otherwise, please spare me the downvotes and the verbiage.
I don't think such political HN threads help anyone (although, they do reveal colors).
Local language is required for government jobs (IAS, engineering in PSU etc.). In engineering companies such as Flipkart, inMobi etc. you will end up speaking local languages when you form your friend circle and if your team speaks a common language. Even if the job doesn't ask for it, you're going to have a tough time fitting in if you don't speak the common language (Hindi, Tamil, Kannada etc).
And be logical, English will always be needed. Which company in the world would be able to deal with 28 official languages internally? Also, there are start-ups moving to address the local market (e-commerce in Tamil, Hindi etc.
All of what you've said btw is mere opinion. None of what you say us objective fact. Speaking the language of your former colonizer doesn't mean the people lack self-respect nor does it have anything to do with any of the "virtues of freedom" as you've pointed out.
Uhh. I wish you could atleast understand this lingua franca you constantly speak of (see disclaimer above). If not please don't bring this moralizing non-sense. Narratives don't make for either logic or reason.
I'm not even sure you understand philosophy or the epistemological meanings of the words you are so desperate to bolster these stupid narratives.
See, the thing is, you don't invalidate any of what I said.
- 90% of India's population does not speak English. This is not "mere opinion".
- EU uses 24 official languages; companies work in the language of the state. East-Asian companies work and do engineering in their respective languages. Unless you claim Indian languages are somehow intrinsically "useless", your narrative is full of BS.
- It's not about "speaking" as was mentioned earlier. It was obvious I was talking about technical/commercial usage. I'm glad it's required in the Govt; it appears this is only the case for low-level jobs. It looks like the country's laws etc. (apparently even the courts ?) function in English. Countries in East-Asia do engineering/business etc. in their own respective languages, some borrowing terms from English, and others (like CN) going out of their way to avoid them.
I don't mean language usage in the Kitchen; I'm not even sure how this can be "economically useful".
- You invalidate nothing written in the NyT article.
Your "argument" is essentially one saying, "ah it's too much work to keep our own identities, so let's just adopt one of the old colonizer". What a pathetic country, and what a fall.
Noam Chomsky notes somewhere the corruption these idiots in post-modernism have on the third world, where intellectuals are desperately needed. I can see what he meant.
You haven't answered my question, which is which company/country deals with 28 languages ? The EU isn't a country. Maybe you don't understand English.
And which company works in multiple languages within it's own home country?
Your wiki source relies on 2001 data (and only considers English speakers [0] and you used as logic that 90% of India doesn't speak English, so it is in fact, mere opinion - yours). When counting both users and speakers, the value was 350M which is ~30% of the population.
It is about speaking. On a single team does it make sense that one does the docs in Hindi, and the non-Hindi speakers do what exactly with this doc? Or does he/she do one in each language? Will every college teach subjects in 28 different languages? Does any European university teach each subject in 28 languages? Do any of the countries in East Asia?
Your NYT article is an opinion piece, it's not admissible or inadmissible. If you're relying on opinion pieces, your logic is already flawed.
Most of what you say is a misrepresentation of facts.
[0]- "Wikipedia's old estimate of 350 million includes two categories – "English Speakers" and "English Users". The distinction between the Speakers and Users is that Users only know how to read English words while Speakers know how to read English, understand spoken English as well as form their own sentences to converse in English.
- some unqualified pedantry about the data being from 2001.
"Oh yeah, we used to oppress people for eons; they've adapted in the past decade."
- The number of fluent English speakers is apparently in the low single digits. Fairly obvious there is a nauseous class system in India, from the NyT article (speaking English gets you a good job ? What kind of society is that ? India is Anglo-Saxon ?).
- I don't think India is "country" in the same way as European states are. To be fair to Europe, Belgium today does work today with both Dutch and French. As a cohort of people, EU, is much closer to India, in terms of diversity etc (yes, I looked up the demographics).
- If you wish to use the epistemological grounding of a European, you're essentially vindicating my position: you have no understanding of the language/concepts you speak.
- Finally, I really don't want to continue this exercise in shallowness (even the narratives are so shallow!). Asking me to answer rhetorical questions hardly amounts to reason.
Good luck being a (medieval) WASP clone, and trampling on people's tongues (see, now, that is an interesting narrative).
You've answered nothing I've asked (350M speakers which is 30% of the pop, Belgium uses 2 languages and somehow India isn't a country) and then end with what is at best a racial insult. You're free to have your opinions, but I don't see the point in arguing with you. You clearly can't or won't read or nor argue coherently and hurl pathetic insults.
Nothing is manifest, things change, but what is the optimal strategy for the present ?
A question - how many east asian programmers write C/C++/Java programs in Korean, Japanese or Chinese ? And if they do, do they have resources such as stackoverflow and forums in their languages ? What about Spanish, German and French programmers ?
Another question - what percentage of a population in any country is engineers ? Is it closer to 90% or 10% in above countries ?
Your points about equal access to opportunity are valid, but the assumption that this is responsible for the GDP being low is not in my opinion - there more complex factors.
In any case since you are feel this is important (there are relatively few who do), please try to improve the situation in some way, rather than just complain. It is hard.
In the first link you sent, read a couple pages down and it explains why even half knowledge of english is critical to capture opportunities as they exist in the present.
I have no stake in the matter; it's fairly obvious I'm speaking to people of the parasitical colonial class (bourgeoisie ?).
Your argument is no different from that "rational" @kartD. It's fairly obvious, you don't even know the definition of a "language" is. If you needed an answer, a google search would have done you good ("yes"); asking me to answer rhetorical devices like "ah, but oppression is our only way towards progress!" is stupid. Somehow no Indian has the comprehension to understand why.
Considering the same thing repeated ad nauseum, I also sense strong doses of brainwashing, or the Indian state employing a 50-cent army like Mao's men. I hope for India's sake that it is the latter.
Well, since answer to the first question I asked is 0% and the second is less than 10%, your so called arguments stand on wafer thin ice, which explains the resort to name calling and 'fairly obvious' arguments.
Instead of worrying about India, I suggest you take care of your own (serious lack of) sanity. There is a hindi saying which comes to mind - adhajal gagri chhalakat jaaye - or, empty vessels make the most noise, which based on your "long dead spiritual center", applies to you.
Such linguistic dissonance that you even have your directions wrong ! What's next you'll claim freedom movements are far right ?! Wow such ability to live with lies. Astonishing.
I can only hope India goes through "clone wars" for humanity's sake.
There are plenty of government and other jobs which would be hard to get without knowing at least one local language. If you really want a job in technology, English would the least of the qualifications you'd need to be concerned about. With a solid background in math/science and demonstrated drive any required linguistic skills would be bridged for you.
It is as practical a matter as the adoption of Indian numerals by Europe in the 1200s in favor of Roman numerals.
English happens to be an Indo-European language and does not seem as 'foreign' to Indians as Indian numerals might have appeared to Europeans.
As an aside, English has recognizable weaknesses as a medium of expression to Indian minds, and if a replacement will be found, chances are it will be synthesized in India.
English is the common language of India. You can go to any decent sized city and if you know English, you can get by. I would say the next most widely understood language would be Hindi. I live in bangalore (native language is kannada) and I've almost zero problems talking to people in a mix of Hindi and English.
> May 23, 2016 ISRO successfully flight tested India’s first winged body aerospace vehicle operating in hypersonic flight regime.
> In this experimental mission, the HS9 solid rocket booster carrying RLV-TD lifted off from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota at 07:00hr IST. After a successful flight of 91.1second, HS9 burn out occurred, following which both HS9 and RLV-TD mounted on its top coasted to a height of about 56 km. At that height, RLV-TD separated from HS9 booster and further ascended to a height of about 65km
So the solid rocket booster, HS9, wasn't reusable.
What looks more interesting to me is:
> The vehicle’s Navigation, Guidance and Control system accurately steered the vehicle during this phase for safe descent
Was it unmanned? On Autopilot?
Pictures and details: http://www.isro.gov.in/launchers/rlv-td
EDIT: according to Wikipedia, the ultimate goal seems to be a fully reusable setup:
> The demonstration trials will pave the way for a two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) fully re-usable launch vehicle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Flight_Experiment