The race to the final frontier

Space shuttle Challenger lifts off at the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on January 28, 1986. - AP

Space exploration is a high-risk field and every spacefaring nation has had its share of calamities.

MUCH ahead of Kalpana Chawla's arrival on the scene, Dr. Ronald McNair, one of the seven astronauts on board Challenger, which exploded soon after lift-off on January 28, 1986, had established an Indian connection to the space shuttle programme. The payload specialist, who had a Ph.D. in laser physics and was an accomplished jazz saxophonist and a black belt in karate, had announced in May 1984 in New Delhi, NASA's offer to take an Indian astronaut on-board a shuttle flight.

Following this, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sent two engineers - N.C. Bhat and P. Radhakrishnan - to train in the United States, and one of them was to fly in September 1986 in the shuttle that would have sent into orbit INSAT-1C. But after the Challenger tragedy all shuttle flights were grounded and a disappointed Bhat and Radhakrishnan returned to India.

The road to space is littered with debris. There is not a single spacefaring nation, be it the U.S., Russia, Japan, China or India, that has not had its share of calamities in this high-risk venture. Ariane 5, the much-vaunted vehicle of Arianespace, run by a European consortium, has suffered four failures since 1996, while India's share of failures began with the very first SLV-3 flight in 1979. Two of China's Long March vehicles, CZ-3 and CZ-3B, failed in 1996.

The shuttle is the most complex space vehicle built yet, with several hundred kilometres of cables, thousands of electrical connections and the largest solid propellant booster ever. It is a hybrid of a rocket, an aircraft and a glider - it blasts off like a rocket, flies like an aircraft and lands like a glider. The Space Transportation System (STS), as the shuttle is officially called, is different from launch vehicles such as Apollo's Saturn rockets, Ariane vehicles or the PSLV, whose spent stages fall into the sea after blast-off and cannot be used again. The shuttle can fly several hundreds of times.

Since 1990, there have been 59 failed space missions, mostly involving launch vehicles and satellites. Since these were unmanned vehicles, there was no loss of life. Of the failed launches, Russia accounted for 22, the U.S. 16, China five, Japan three, India and Brazil two each, and North Korea and Israel one each. Arianespace has had seven such failures.

NASA had a calamity on January 27, 1967 when three astronauts - Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee - were burnt alive on the launchpad in a fire aboard their Apollo spacecraft. An oxygen tank of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, launched on a lunar mission on April 11, 1970, exploded on April 14. Its three-member crew returned to Earth safely on April 17 using the oxygen and power of the lunar module. The thought uppermost in everybody's mind was whether the astronauts would be stranded in space.

In 1986, a particularly bad year for the U.S., first came the Challenger tragedy in January. Then the "trusty' Titan rocket exploded on April 18. It was a second successive Titan failure within a year after nine successive flights. The Nike Orion rocket was lost on April 25. The "long reliable" Delta vehicle tumbled out of control on May 3 and it was "destructed". In 1999, an equally bad year, two Titan vehicles, one Delta rocket and an Athena vehicle went astray. Satellites worth billions of dollars were lost in these flights. While three flights took place from Cape Canaveral, Florida, one was from the Vandenberg Air Force base, California.

Russia has lost several types of vehicles including Proton, Soyuz, Volna, Kosmos, Tsiklon and Zenit between 1990 and 2002. The launches took place from Baikanur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan or Plesetsk, Russia.

Cosmonaut Vladimir M. Komarov died when the Soyuz 1 spacecraft crashed in April 1967, after re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Three cosmonauts died aboard Soyuz 11 in 1971. The first, second and third Luna launches in 1958 failed. A Korabl Sputnik 3 spacecraft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at a steep angle because of a malfunctioning retro-rocket. Its two canine passengers - Pchelka and Mushka - were lost.

The maiden flight of Ariane 5, on June 4, 1996, ended in failure 37 seconds after it took off from the Kourou island in the French Guiana. The vehicle veered off its path, broke up and exploded. Ariane 5 failed again on October 30, 1997, and its satellites were stranded in orbit. It misbehaved again on its flight on July 12, 2001; a fuelling problem led to a premature shutdown of its upper stage engine. Two satellites, worth millions of dollars, entered wrong orbits. The fourth failure was on December 12, 2002.

India's maiden attempt to go into space failed when the SLV-3, launched on August 10, 1979 from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, rained nitric acid from its solenoid valve. Prof. Satish Dhawan, ISRO Chairman, told reporters at the launch station: "It was our first step. We stumbled a little but did not fall flat on our face." Vasant Gowariker, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, later told this correspondent that the rocket trying to go up without nitric acid in its solenoid valve "was like your trying to drive a car without petrol".

The next flight of the SLV-3 on July 18, 1980, signalled India's entry into the space club as the sixth member. This flight, which Gowariker called a "fantastic success", put a 35-kg Rohini satellite into a low-earth orbit. However, the next flight of the SLV-3, on May 31, 1981, was a failure. The Rohini satellite that it carried was deployed in a lower orbit than targeted, causing it to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up nine days after launch. Its life span was to be 90 days. Gowariker said a redeeming feature was that "in spite of tremendous adverse conditions, the four-stage vehicle which will have normally broken into pieces, withstood them and, in fact, behaved beautifully". The next flight of the SLV-3, with its fourth-stage motor encased in kevlar fibre, was a success.

The first flight of the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV) on March 24, 1987, failed when the first-stage motor did not ignite and the vehicle tumbled into the Bay of Bengal. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was present at Sriharikota, asked the ISRO engineers not to "lose heart". Prof. U.R. Rao, ISRO Chairman, asserted that the failure "will only push us forward". But the next ASLV flight on July 13, 1988, also failed because of "abnormal behaviour" of the first stage. Prof. Rao said, "This is certainly very disheartening. Thousands of people have worked hard for one and a half years." But the succeeding two ASLV flights, on May 20, 1992 and May 4, 1994, were successful.

ISRO faced failures again when its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) flight on September 20, 1993, tumbled into the sea because of a software error in the onboard guidance system. But the next six missions of the PSLV were hugely successful and involved the launch of multiple satellites. The last PSLV flight in September 2002 launched METSAT in a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

The first GSLV flight on April 18, 2001, was a success. ISRO recovered "remarkably in just three weeks" to prepare the vehicle again after its earlier flight was aborted one second before lift-off owing to a problem in the gas injector in one of the strap-on engines. However, the GSAT that the GSLV put in orbit "drifted away" because of shortage of 10 kg of liquid propellant on board the satellite. The second flight of the GSLV is likely in March/April this year from Sriharikota.