New Delhi.- India failed this Monday in the launch of a critical space mission by losing control of its new spy satellite and 15 other payloads, including a Spanish device,
due to an anomaly in the carrier rocket, reported the country’s Space Research Organization (ISRO).
«We have observed a deviation in performance during the third stage. The mission could not follow the planned profile», confirmed ISRO President V. Narayanan, in an initial statement that points to the loss of the devices, although engineers are still reviewing the telemetry.
PSLV-C62 Rocket
The PSLV-C62 rocket had taken off at 10:17 local time (04:47 GMT) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, however, minutes later, a technical failure in the third stage prevented the injection of the devices into orbit.
Among the losses is a payload from Spain, the KID (Kestrel Initial Technology Demonstrator), a scale prototype developed by a Spanish startup to test a future re-entry vehicle.
The flight plan established that the KID would be the last passenger to be released to perform a re-entry maneuver into the Earth’s atmosphere and splash down in the South Pacific Ocean.
The rocket failure has frustrated this return technology test.
EOS-N1 Earth Observation Satellite
The mission’s primary payload was the EOS-N1 Earth observation satellite (named ‘Anvesha’), an asset to provide high-resolution imagery, crucial for monitoring the borders with China and Pakistan.
Alongside the Indian “spy” and the Spanish cargo, the mission was carrying devices from clients in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Nepal, as well as several Indian startup projects, whose business ambitions are now on hold.
The Indian space agency indicated that the data is being analyzed, without officially declaring the flight a failure at the moment.
Second Consecutive Accident of the PSLV Rocket
This is the second consecutive accident of the PSLV rocket in less than a year, after its only flight of 2025 also ended in disaster due to an identical problem in the third stage.
This model is also responsible for the country’s greatest space milestones: it launched the first mission to the Moon (Chandrayaan-1), the Mars probe (Mangalyaan), the Aditya-L1 solar observatory, and set a world record in 2017 by putting 104 satellites into orbit in a single flight.
