President A P J Abdul Kalam on Friday said the aerospace community in India had reached maturity in realizing complex technology products and missions through sustained efforts and had the ability to meet the stringent international standards in performance and cost and competitiveness.
Outlining some challenging future missions, Dr Kalam said the Indian aeronautical community is ready with a roadmap for a 150-seater civilian aircraft as a public-private partnership mode and the R&D and infrastructure build-up for the same has to start right away with innovative programme management methodologies.
ISRO has initiated programmes for a reusable two stage to orbit launch vehicle demonstrator and air breathing propulsion modules. Work has started on the feasibility studies for a manned mission to low earth orbit by 2014.
DRDO has goals to develop stealth aircrafts and long range reusable hypersonic cruise missiles.
"In the next two decades, I visualize the integration of multiple technologies of supersonic aircraft, missiles and spacecraft to transform into an unmanned supersonic long-range and low radar cross section aircraft replacing manned fighter aircraft.
"The academic institutions and the public and private sector industries have large roles in successful accomplishments of these national initiatives. Particularly the current production activities in aggregate and total systems will move over to industries," he said.
India is already working to evolve innovative design concepts for both small as well as large payloads into space. The goal here is to reduce the cost of access to space by one or two orders of magnitude.
Even a small scientific breakthrough, for example, in air breathing propulsion systems may lead to a revolution in space transportation. The space community has a huge stake in such breakthrough research in advanced inter- disciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration.
"When I see in front of me, the confluence of Aeronautical and Astronautical communities, a number of major recent accomplishments by Indian institutions in these fields vividly come to my mind," he said.
On January 10, 2007, ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully launched four
satellites -- India's CARTOSAT-2 and Space capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-1), Indonesia's LAPAN-TUBSAT and Argentina's PEHUENSAT-1 into a 635 km high polar orbit.
On January 22, 2007, the space capsule was brought back from space in a controlled and safe manner to a designated point on Earth.
"This is an important step towards manned missions and for our future operations in industrialization of space. Tejas Light Combat Aircraft has undergone nearly 700 flight tests in six aircrafts, one of them belonging to the limited series production class. The performance and maneuver of Tejas in this year's Air Show at Bangalore has led aircraft manufacturers to reckon Tejas as a competitive combat supersonic aircraft. Indian 14-seater aircraft SARAS was also displayed at the air show," he pointed out.
In November 2006, India successfully conducted the PADE (Prithvi Air Defence Exercise) in which an Anti-ballistic missile, called the Exo-atmospheric interceptor system intercepted a Prithvi-II ballistic missile.
On April 12, 2007, Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Agni-III was successfully launched by DRDO paving the way for long range missions.
On April 22, 2007, the Army version of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile was handed over to the Indian Army after successful completion of the flight evaluation by the users.
The next day, the Indian PSLV-C8 placed the Italian Scientific Satellite 'Agile' into a precise circular orbit of 550 km graduating ISRO to a commercial system deliverer for international market.
