Political leaders laud ISRO's winged reusable launch vehicle

President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and a host of leaders congratulated ISRO's successfully tested its home-grown winged RLV.

A scale version of a 'Reusable Launch Vehicle' or RLV-TD as it is launched from Sriharikota on the south-east coast of India. Pic/PTI

India on Monday successfully tested its home-grown winged reusable launch vehicle (RLV), demonstrating its space technology prowess and joining an elite club of space-faring nations like the US, Russia and France.

Here are some of the tweets...

The sleek 1.7-tonne RLV was latched on top of a 15-tonne rocket with a booster for lift-off from the spaceport here in Andhra Pradesh, about 80km north of Chennai, off the Bay of Bengal coast.

After 91.1 seconds into the flight, the burn out occurred while the rocket along its vehicle coasted to an altitude of 56km and separated to ascend to 65km above the earth in sub-orbital space.

From 65km height, the vehicle began its descent followed by atmospheric re-entry at Mach 5 (five times speed of sound).

The entire flight duration from launch to landing in the sea was 13.3 minutes.