Indian space startup fires world’s first fully 3D printed rocket engine ...

Indian space startup fires world’s first fully 3D printed rocket engine as others play catch up

An Indian space startup named Agnikul Cosmos based out of Chennai has become the world's first company to successfully test a fully 3D printed rocket engine.

Agnikul Cosmos has successfully fired its higher stage semi-cryogenic rocket engine called Agnilet. “This entire engine, Agnilet, is just one piece of hardware from start to finish and has zero assembled parts,” said co-founder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran.

Another space startup that’s hot its heels is Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace founded by former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka. In September last year, they too revealed their fully 3D printer cryogenic rocket engine dubbed Dhawan-I.

Dhawan-I will be used to power the Vikram-II rocket, which Skyroot is also building from scratch.

The startup entered an NDA with the DoS earlier this month on February 2. They will be able to use ISRO’s test and launch facilities to test their Vikram-I rocket and eventually Dhawan-I as well.

The global space industry is expected to generate $1.1 trillion or more by 2040, according to Morgan Stanley — more than triple its current value of $350 billion. And, new space engine technology like 3D printed rocket engines are expected to play a big role in this explosion of value.

 

This is a magnificent achievement !!! - congratulations to the company and the Indian Government !!!

 

South Africa is having a sale on 3D printed stealth cruise missiles.

 

India's space program costs around $4 billion US.

Two-thirds of people in India live in poverty; 68.8% of the Indian population lives on less than $2 a day. Over 30% have less than $1.25 per day. More than 200 million Indians don’t have sufficient access to food, including 61 million children. 7.8 million infants have a birth weight of less than 2.5 kilograms. 1.4 million children die each year in India before their fifth birthday.

 

India was among the first countries to use satellites to reach rural areas, inventing affordable satellite dishes made of bamboo. This new rocket engine will advance their sciences and technology, while helping their people and expanding their economy. Cheap is good, especially when you are talking about rockets with payloads that cost $100,000.oo per pound. Rocket science never interested me, but my father helped put up satellites for the GPS system.

India's newest efforts include a desperately needed national highway system, and if they can invent anti-gravity, it would help. Unfortunately, rising sea levels and a rather large ice berg about to break off of Antarctica are poised to flood a huge percentage of India.

 

India's space program costs two billion dollars in 2021-2, not four billion dollars.

Often its expeditionary projects such as the one to Mars, Mangalyaan has been attempted on shoestring budgets. Mangalyaan, launched in 2013, was the first space probe from earth to reach Mars on its first attempt. It had a budget of a mere 64 million dollars, much less than high budget Hollywood films.

Chandrayaan, launched in 2008, and which was instrumental in discovery of water on the moon, cost just 54 million dollars.

India along with China has been the richest nation on earth for many millenniums till new kids on the block came up on the scene in the last two or three centuries. Due to a nasty experience with exploitative colonialism it had ended poverty-stricken in the last century, but it has now reared up and galloping forward to be the fastest growing economy on earth again.

It is an uphill task to lift a 1.35 billion population to prosperity again. At present, India has created the largest pool on earth of scientific, engineering and managerial personnel through its educational institutions.

We have an advantage of having a highly youthful population, proportionately speaking , and this augurs well in terms of creativity and innovation.

The challenge thus is to harness these young intellectual energies to ensure high productivity in all spheres of material life. Due to inspiring leadership in the form of Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan and Abdul Kalam and others, we are now becoming fast self-reliant in science and technology, and hopefully will create cutting edge scientific discoveries and technological applications in the near future.

The Indian space programme is already doing great business gaining 1000 per cent return on its expenditure. It has inspired many students to take fields of science and technology in India.

The Indian space agency, ISRO has also earned the praise of Elon Musk for its 2017 world record in sending 104 sattelites to space on a single mission.

Yeah, awesome achievement by ISRO. Very impressive!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 16, 2017


We had created mathematics in its basic form which was learnt by the Arabs and europeans later on, and which replaced roman numerals and revolutionised modern science, technology and accounting.

In the early part of sixth century A.D., Indian physicist Aryabhata calculated the sidereal rotation (the rotation of the earth referencing the fixed stars) as 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds; the modern value is 23:56:4.091. Similarly, his value for the length of the sidereal year at 365 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds (365.25858 days)is an error of 3 minutes and 20 seconds over the length of a year (365.25636 days).

Indian mathematics reached Europe six centuries later after Aryabhata.

We have also created mathematicians like Ramanujan at present, whom mathematician G.H.Hardy found comparable "only with Euler or Jacobi" in terms of genius. The elementary particle Boson was named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose who developed with Einstein, Bose–Einstein statistics, which theorizes the characteristics of elementary particles.

There are many other names like Jagdish Chandra Bose, C.V.Raman, Subrahmanya Chandrasekhar, Meghnad Saha, Jayant Narlikar,P.C.Mahalanobis, D.P.Kaprekar and so on who have distinguished themselves with discoveries in the various sciences.

So we have an excellent tradition in science and technology already.

 

As I stated earlier, India has created the world's largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world, and we need to channel these energies in a way that is profitable to India and the world through groundbreaking projects. We have an excellent tradition going for us in science and technology along with the genetic potential of an ancient civilization.

At present, around 60 per cent of the world's flora and fauna has been found to be extinct due to human activity since 1970, and it is possible that the rest will be extinct within a few decades.

Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds

Because of foolish international leadership unable to see outside the box or perceive the bigger picture, the risk of a nuclear holocaust wiping out all life on earth is also pretty high.

So obviously it is important to colonise other planets, moons or potentially habitable locations and terraform them. And this includes the moon, Mars and even Venus for that matter. Hopefully, Indian scientists and engineers will develop scientific and technological capabilities in this regard, which would be helpful in relocating humanity and reducing the pressure on earth's fragile resources, especially its flora and fauna.

Mining of other planets and asteroids for mineral wealth can also bring unprecedented wealth and prosperity to humanity again, and can help reduce conflicts amongst human beings for petty issues.

The technological spinoffs that come with research and innovation can also bring about a quantum leap in this regard.

 

India’s space programme has a total budget of around $4 billion

 

Shame.

 

It is just a typo error. The budget allocated to ISRO in the 2020 budget is 2 billion or more precisely 1.89 billion dollars.

Indian Space Research Organisation - Wikipedia

Budget 2020 | Spending on space goes up by 8%

 

India has a mixed economy combining the elements of capitalism (regulated by the government) and socialism. This enables numerous concessions to the poor and underprivileged in India such as free food or food at very cheap rates, medical care and education.

Socialism has helped us very much to overcome the ravages caused by exploitative colonialism in the past.

Many of the emerging Indian millionaires and billionaires in India (dollar terms ) have come up from very poor families as they have a greater drive and hunger for success. This is the same for Indians settled in other countries who had emerged wealthy through entrepreneurship.

Abdul Kalam, who played a sterling role in India's space programme was from a poverty stricken fisherman's family, who had to start working at age of 10 along with his studies at school.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan , the present chairman of ISRO is similarly of a poverty stricken family who had arrived at his position by his diligent scholarship and work ethics. Many other ISRO positions have been filled with aspiring youngsters from poverty stricken families.

From A Sleepy Hamlet To ISRO: The Journey Of Odisha Farmer's Son To The Stars | OTV News

A rupee in India can fetch much more than a dollar in America or a pound in Britain, especially in rural India. The cost of living is very low compared to other countries, especially in the west where you have to keep working hard incessantly and strenuously just to pay back the interests of credit card debts .

I had created a thread in this regard...

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev on understanding the nature of mental illness....

Imo, this is one of the reasons why many foreigners prefer living in India after retirement as living in their own countries would bankrupt them to penury or a dismally low quality of life.

The Indian allopathic medical service is also much cheaper than the western and for this reason rakes in billions of dollars each year through medical tourism from foreign tourists.

Medical tourism in India - Wikipedia

Medical tourism in India could be a booming $9 billion industry by 2020 - CNN