‘A-Sat a completely desi baby’

India on Wednesday displayed its ability to kill enemy satellites in the future by successfully destroying one of its own Satellites — MICROSAT-R — which was in an orbit about 274 km from Earth. In an interview to Chethan Kumar just hours after the successful test, G. Satheesh Reddy, DG, DRDO, which developed the missile, speaks of how and all the technologies are completely indigenous, and what it took to put India into an elite group of countries. Excerpts:

India today entered an elite club, can you elaborate on the journey to D-day?
While we have been working on the technology for a while as you know, serious work on it started about two years ago in 2016-17. We went into mission mode only six months ago from when we worked day and night. This is a new missile that has been developed with required corresponding technologies although we have used some existing technology as background.


What were some of the challenges?
I cannot speak too much about the actual technology used, but the challenges were broadly in three main areas: One, we needed to achieve a really high accuracy level given the nature of the target; two, we had to significantly improve capabilities to reach a target at a high altitude and three, we have developed a host of technologies that enabled us to identify, track and intercept.

Where does this put India strategically?
See, this is a completely desi baby, from the missiles to its sub-systems, software, sensors and everything has been developed indigenously, which puts us in an elite club of technology-achieved nations, now other countries will now look at us and would want to work with us in that level. Number two, given that this is a very high-end technology, a lot systems and technologies developed for this will be useful for future programme. It also acts as a deterrent in a scenario that affects our security.

What is the next step in this direction?
As of today we have physically demonstrated our technology, we will now have to chalk out the plans for future. Even as of today, we have a capability to hit a target as far away as 1,000 km in space. However, we only hit a target in a lower range keeping in mind the issue of space debris and because this was to only show that we can do it.