Aerospace technologies to be used for societal benefits: ISRO

ISRO chairman A S Kiran Kumar today said there was immense potential for the aerospace technologies to be used for society's benefit.
"There are lot of potentials for the aerospace inertial systems to enthuse student community. It is essential to convert the technologies achieved into practical use for the benefit of the society", he said.
Kiran Kumar, who is also the Secretary, Department of Space, was speaking after inaugurating a two day National Conference on 'Advances in Aerospace Inertial Systems' at the ISRO Inertial Systems Unit (IISU), here.
The conference is being organised by Aeronautical Society of India, Thiruvananthapuram branch in association with IISU.

Presiding over the function, Dr K Sivan, Director, VSSC,said ISRO had achieved self reliance in the area of high accuracy optical inertial navigation sensors and called for further developments in this area to achieve low cost access to space.
PS Veeraraghavan, Former Director, VSSC delivered the keynote address on 'Inertial Sensors & Systems in Space-World Scenario'.

There were invited lectures by experts in the area of inertial systems and several industry presentations.
Q: Why is India indulging in this when the whole world
has retired, nobody is attempting winged flights in a big way, why is ISRO going into this RLV technology?

A: No, ultimately our objective is to lower cost of access to space. We still believe that we have a very good opportunity to go through this research and achieve a significant reduction in the cost of the launch.
Q: So making satellites cheaper for average users?
A: Yes, not only the satellites cheaper, but also all the space infrastructure what we have to build for various activities, our ability significantly increases because the overall cost comes down.
Q: So this launch of RLV, are you excited by it?
A: Definitely we are excited by that, because there is a new set of activities which we are doing in terms of the aerodynamics, winged body, we have gone through a series of wind tunnel tests, and then there are a lot of new design approaches in this, and it also gives a tremendous amount of challenge to the designers and the engineers in the organisation.

Moreover, when the end result is going to be to bring down the cost of launch, we are all excited about that.
Q: So pushing the frontier, is that what the reason?
A: Yes, definitely, it is pushing the frontier. And one needs to keep challenging the people within ISRO for achieving better results in this particular case, the better result is: how to bring down the cost of launch.