BANGALORE, July 10: A deep space rocket carrying India’s heaviest satellite disintegrated in a fiery plume of smoke and flames seconds after lift-off Monday, dealing a crippling blow to the country’s ambitious space programme.

The rocket called the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) blasted off at 1205 GMT from an island off the coast of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, cartwheeled and disintegrated seconds later in clear view.

“A mishap happened in the first stage of the separation and it will be some time before we know what went wrong,” Madhavan Nair, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman, told reporters at the launch site.

Disaster struck ISRO less than a day after an unsuccessful test flight of India’s Agni-III nuclear-capable missile which has a range of 4,000 kilometres and designed to arm New Delhi with a ballistic weapon.

The 49-metre GSLV carried a 2,168-kilogram satellite to be put into stationary orbit at 36,000 kilometres and programmed to boost television services for the next 10 years.

It was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal. A similar GSLV successfully placed a satellite in orbit in 2004.

Indian scientists citing preliminary data blamed snags in the seperation process in both the two-stage Agni and the three-stage GSLV as the cause for their failures.

Experts also described the unsuccessful launch as a temporary setback.

“I would describe it as a setback but not a show-stopper,” said K. Santhanam, a former chief advisor of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), which is developing the Agni missiles.

“Such high-technology systems do take a little time to mature ... and such mishaps are not unknown in space history,” Santhanam told CNN-IBN television.

Uday Bhaskar, deputy director of the state-funded Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, said the GSLV’s failure should not be viewed as the end of road for ISRO’s space programme.

“There has been a setback but the scale of the setback should be placed in context because countries before India who have embarked upon satellite launch business too have gone through a similar learning curve,” he said.

U.R. Rao, former chief of the Space Commission, said it was a “mishap” not a setback.

“We will come to know the problem in the next few days. The amount (33 million dollars for the launch) is small compared to other nation’s budget,” he said.— AFP