'Failure will not hit manned mission and Chandrayaan-2'

NEW DELHI: U R RAO, former Isro chairman, advocates a thorough postmortem to understand the GSLV launch fizzle and insists failures such as these won't impact India's ambitious Chandrayaan-2 and manned space mission programmes.

There's always a general worry and unhappiness when a launch fails. But we can't allow that to bog us down. We've to zero in on the problem and work out an appropriate solution. I'm sure Isro will do that. Discussions are already on to find the nature of the problem. Scientists will pour through thousands of pages of data before coming to a conclusion.

The timing and sequence of events are very important to understand why the launch did not succeed. The first stage is primarily powered by a solid propellant. If there's a failure here, we have to look at the data that caused it.

Sometimes, the first stage is also a mix of solid and liquid propellants. The first and second stages of GSLV and PSLV are similar in this regard. The third is the cryogenic stage. In this case, the cryogenic engines were Russian. We need to look at the data generated to understand whether a snag in the first stage caused the launch failure and what its nature was. The GSLV failure won't impact India's Chandrayaan-2 programme in 2013 and manned mission to space in 2016.

These two programmes won't be altered. The launch vehicles for the two missions will have different parameters and perhaps be bigger than the one there is now.