India won’t reveal the cause of its two PSLV rocket failures
India’s space agency ISRO,
as transparent as mud
Though one of India’s high government officials yesterday announced that its space agency ISRO had “resolved” the third stage issue that caused two consecutive failures of its PSLV rocket, that official also refused to provide any details.
Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh on Saturday said that the anomaly in the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) has been resolved. Dr. Singh said on the sidelines of the Research, Industry, Start-up and Entrepreneurship (RISE) Conclave 2026 in Bengaluru, that the national level expert committee constituted to review the reason for anomaly in PSLV Vehicle has submitted its report and the anomaly has been detected.
“The report has come out and the anomaly has been detected. However we cannot share that (reason for the anomaly) on a public platform. But experts are working on it, which has been resolved and very soon we will be back on the track,” Dr. Singh said replying to a query by The Hindu.
Note that after the first third stage failure in 2025, ISRO was also reticent about revealing the problem and how it fixed it. Then the third stage failed again at almost the exact same moment during the next launch in January 2026.
A month later this same official announced ISRO knew what the problem was and had fixed it — once again giving no details — and said the next launch was scheduled for June 2026. It is now June, and despite Singh’s promise no PSLV launch is being prepared.
This lack of transparancy speaks very badly for ISRO. It will make it extremely difficult for it to attract any commercial customers. In fact, that is basically what has happened. Before the Covid panic ISRO had a decent share of the commercial satellite market. Now, even with that satellite market growing in leaps and bounds, it has almost no commercial customers.
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I don’t know if India is a “face culture” to the same degree as, say, the Chinese, but government in all nations – our own by no means excepted – tends to embody face culture and I suspect that’s what we’re seeing here.
If the ISRO bureaucracy continues to poison the well for foreign commercial satellite launch contracts by remaining unreasonably tight-lipped about its problems, then only some non-trivial pushing from above is going to correct matters.
To the Modi administration one can only observe – “Hurt’s when you do that? Don’t do that!”
It isn’t just nations…didn’t we see closed-ranks behind Conestoga/Percheron/whatsit?
Anomaly is only a bit better than “observation.”
Not that I recall. I recall reading at the time that the Percheron failure was because the actuator for a LOX valve froze – Matagorda was too humid in the summer it seems. Valves. It’s always the guldarn valves. The failure was pretty well covered in the space media of the time. Certainly Gary Hudson was never cagey about the failure. I bought him lunch about a year later and we talked about it. I was just a rando Libertarian space cadet at the time – nobody special.
Conestoga-1 required no stonewalling because it worked. It just didn’t get any orders for subsequent missions – NASA bad-mouthing to potential customers I’m sure.
There was a failure, years later, of a rocket also called Conestoga that shared some DNA with Conestoga-1 and that was widely covered at the time too. This was still a time, of course, when NASA was actively attempting to induce crib death in every private-sector launcher outfit that popped up.
“This was still a time, of course, when NASA was actively attempting to induce crib death in every private-sector launcher outfit that popped up.”
Well obviously those outfits deserved it because Conestoga/Percheron/whatsit closed ranks just like one of the world’s largest nation states, dontcha know. /s