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Aesma wrote:Looks closer to an Ariane 5, which has proven reliable. SRBs too. One big cryo engine, though.
Aesma wrote:One big cryo engine, though.
BawliBooch wrote:The Vikas Engine is a straight lift from the French Viking. The Cryo upper stage is lifted from a Russian design.
BarfBag wrote:ArianceSpace and ISRO have a long history of collaboration - one of the earliest Ariane 1 payloads was ISRO's APPLE - Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment. Arianespace have also launched more than 20 ISRO satellites, and have one last contracted GSAT launch before LVM3 (and PSLV/GSLV) takes over all ISRO launches.
Indian journalists have repeated that assertion, calling Agni "the most spectacular of a series of success stories in indigenous missile development." Agni was indeed spectacular. But although its development was indigenous, its technology was definitely imported.
If the so-called world car is designed in one country, put together in another, and uses parts from still others, Agni is a world ballistic missile. Its heritage traces back to 1963, when the United States started New Delhi's space program by launching a small scientific sounding rocket in India.
It also helped design the Thumba test range, where more than 350 U.S., Soviet, British, and French sounding rockets were fired in the ensuing years. During that time, Abdul Kalam himself studied rocketry at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, where the advanced Scout rocket was developed, and at the Wallops Island Test Center, off the Virginia coast, where Scouts were used to launch small payloads into orbit.
NASA was even willing to sell a Scout to India with the blessings of the Commerce Department, according to one missile expert, and was only prevented from doing so by the Department of State. No matter, Kalam was able to collect so much material on the unclassified rocket that it eventually metamorphosed as Space Launch Vehicle No. 3.
SLV-3 not only was India's first satellite launcher, but became the scientific prototype and political cover for Agni. That is how the line between civilian and military programs can be blurred to the point of being meaningless. The technology required to orbit a satellite or drop a warhead onto an enemy target is similar; it's basically only a matter of how high the sights are set and what the rocket carries.
U.S. aid to India's missile program was extensive and did not end in the space age's formative years. Historically, Agni was the true son of Scout, which was first used in 1960. Yet, incredibly, only a week before Agni's successful test, meetings were scheduled between American and Indian officials to discuss new ways in which Washington could expedite the sale of advanced space technology to India-technology, for example, that would help Kalam and his colleagues simultaneously test how a missile performed when it was vibrating and accelerating during launch.
The Department of Commerce, which is supposed to foster exports, again approved the sale. But the Pentagon and the CIA, which worry about superweapons proliferation, blocked it.
Ironically, even as intelligence reports on the Agni launch were coming into Washington that May 22, two special agents of the Department of State's Office of Munitions Control were busily pounding out a telling memorandum to the U.S. Attorney in Newark.
It reported on the progress of their investigation into how radiation-hardened General Electric computers and microchips used to guide and control U.S. nuclear missiles had found their way into the Indian Space Research Organization's inventory. What it all boiled down to, the agents explained, was that their investigation was dead.
The computers and chips were ambiguous, so called dual-use items, which meant that they could have as easily gone into a civilian rocket as a military one. Since U.S. policy encouraged the peaceful uses of space by other countries, particularly with products made in America, export law would no doubt allow the transaction. That being the case, as it often was, the U.S. attorney decided that pursuing the matter further was futile.
The U.S. contribution to India's missile program pales, however, in comparison to France's and is nearly eclipsed by Germany's and the Soviet Union's. France not only launched sounding rockets from India, but licensed Indian production of one of them, Centaure, in the late 1960s.
The Soviets sold the Indians SA-2 guideline surface-to-air missiles - the same weapons that brought down the U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers in 1960 - which had a surface-to-surface range of up to twenty-seven miles when paired and specially configured. The Agni rocket's upper stage is identical with India's Prithvi, a Scud-like short-range tactical missile, which is in turn powered by a pair of SA-2 engines mounted side by side.
BawliBooch wrote:The current "cryo" is an interim solution. The engine they eventually plan to use is a lift from a Russian design?
BawliBooch wrote:Some would say "collaboration", some would say copy. It is laughable to say that France would not be able to develop the Viking if it was not for India's "help". Hilarious!
BawliBooch wrote:I leave it to Western readers to derive their own conclusions on the proliferation of Western Technology into the hands of dangerous regimes in unstable parts of the world, especially now with India being led by a extreme right-wing fascist govt.