India launches communications satellite

 SRIHARIKOTA, India (AFP) — India sent into orbit a rocket carrying the replacement for a communications satellite destroyed last year, raising its hopes of competing for global satellite launch business.

The 49-metre (1,481-feet) rocket carrying the Insat-4CR satellite blasted off from the Sriharikota space station in southern India at 6:21 pm (1251 GMT) on Sunday after a two-hour delay due to a technical glitch.

Weighing 2,130 kilogrammes (4,700 pounds), the satellite is equipped with 12 wideband channels -- known as transponders -- that allow digital transmission on each at the same time by several video and audio networks.

Sunday's launch was viewed as crucial to India's aims to grab a slice of the 2.5-billion-dollar heavy satellite launch business as well as meet its own booming telecommunications demand.

"It was a very nice take off with the evening skies so luminous and majestic and the thundering sound of the rocket," said Indian Space Research Organisation chief G. Madhavan Nair after the launch.

Anxiety levels were high ahead of the fifth launch of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) series rocket, a year after its predecessor had to be destroyed less than a minute after lift off when it veered from its path.

"This mission from all point of view has been highly dramatic," said Nair, who was congratulated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

"We had really gone through the mill. On one side we had the anxiety coming from the previous failure."

But Sunday's launch, which cost the agency the equivalent of 100 million dollars, proved that Indian rockets were "as reliable as any other launch vehicle in the world," Nair said.

"We are getting enquiries from foreign customers," he added.

Cheers and clapping marked the launch, which a spokesman for the Bangalore-based agency said was vital for India's increasing volumes of fax and Internet traffic, and television and video services.

"The high-powered satellite will augment the country's communication capacity and help meet increasing demand," said the spokesman.

Launched in the 1980s, Insat is the largest domestic communication satellite system in the Asia-Pacific region, providing services in telecommunications, television broadcasting and meteorology including disaster warning.

India started its space programme in 1963, carrying out its first successful launch of a domestic satellite by an Indian-built rocket in 1980.

The satellites have been used for years to map natural resources and predict the weather to help farmers and the rural poor, but India has recently moved towards commercial exploitation of space technology.

The space agency in April launched an Italian satellite for a fee for the first time, signalling its entry into the commercial launch market. It also earns money from telecom and broadcast companies who use its transponders.