The special booster or the first stage is powered using a solid fuel and it will hoist the RLV-TD experiment to about 70 km into the atmosphere from where the descent will begin. The 6.5-m-long 'aeroplane'-like spacecraft will weigh 1.75 tons and will be hoisted into the atmosphere on a special rocket booster. India embarked on making its own version of the space shuttle by thinking about it more than 15 years ago, but work in earnest it seems started only five years ago when a dedicated team of engineers and scientists plunged into making RLV-TD a reality. After that the French and Japanese have made some experimental flights and from available literature it seems the Chinese have never attempted a space shuttle. The Russians made only a single space shuttle and called it Buran it flew into space just once in 1989.

The only countries that have attempted operational flights of a space shuttle are America, which flew its space shuttle 135 times and then retired it in 2011 and since then it lost its capacity to send astronauts in space on American made rockets. The final version will take at least 10-15 years to get ready since designing a human rated reusable rocket is no kid stuff. K Sivan, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, says, 'These are just the first baby steps towards the big Hanuman leap.'

Very similar in its looks to the American space shuttle, the RLV-TD being experimented is a scale model which is almost 6 times smaller than the final version.

Indian space shuttle launch