KA-CHANDRAYAAN-PSLV

HAL and L&T sign MoU to manufacture industry-made PSLV

Bengaluru, Jan 11 (PTI): The Indian Space Research

Organisation Friday said that its strategic partners Hindustan

Aeronautics Limited and L&T have signed an MoU to manufacture

the industry-made Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).

ISRO has initiated an action plan to get the PSLV

production ready through industry, with the Government

clearing the proposal.

PSLV has been ISRO's workhorse with 45 flights,

including India's successful missions to the Moon and Mars.

Until now, public and private industries have been

supplying devices, components and sub-systems for the PSLV.

ISRO is taking steps to hand over the entire gamut of

launch vehicle manufacture to domestic industry by 2020.

"Anticipating such a proposal and earlier

interactions, the current strategic partners of ISRO -- HAL

and L&T -- signed an MoU for realising the PSLV stages and

supply to ISRO, making use of existing supply chain for

materials and components and production and integration

facilities of ISRO,"the space agency said on its website.

ISRO Chairman K Sivan said that a consortium has

already been created between L&T and HAL and they are ready to

take up the production of PSLV.

Terming it as a "major milestone", he said "L&T and

HALhave already come together. They have signed an agreement.

They came and spoke to me yesterday...now in this

consortium, other companies are also going to join."

Citing several advanced time-bound projects likethe

commercialisation of GSLV Mk III,Gaganyaan human space mission

and otheradvanced space exploration missions, ISRO said its

limited resources would be utilised for these projects for

their timelycompletion, where a lot of Research and

Development is involved.

"The regular production of PSLV shall be realised by

anindustry consortium and ISRO will confine itself to do

missionanalysis and planning and configuration controls," it

said.

PSLV, a "versatile" vehicle designed and developed by

ISRO, has been successfully deployed for remote sensing,

Navigation, communication and deep space missions.

According to ISRO, the reliability of the vehicle isas

high as 0.97 and the vehicle is gaining importance in the

international market as the demand for satellite launches are

increasing continuously from customers, inaddition to

domestic users.