On January 12, as the PSLV-C62 mission rose from Sriharikota into the morning sky and its third stage kicked on, the live telecast abruptly stopped showing the rocket’s performance and trajectory. As it became evident that its third stage had suffered an anomaly, putting paid to the C62 mission in a manner similar to the PSLV-C61 mission in May 2025, the change in the telecast became more familiar. For decades, the PSLV has been the ‘workhorse’ of India’s space ambitions. Together with the rocket’s technology being mature, the implication is that the mistakes that sank two PSLV launches could be on the quality assurance side. At least, these are not likely to be isolated anomalies. The C61 mission failed after its third stage lost chamber pressure, but rather than publicly reveal the diagnosed root cause, the decision was to leave the Failure Analysis Committee (FAC) report with the Prime Minister’s Office. ISRO provided assurances of “structural reinforcements” and cleared the PSLV for its next flight. The symptom of the C62 failure, a “roll rate disturbance”, parallels the events preceding the C61 failure. The financial consequences are poor: under the aegis of NewSpace India Limited, ISRO has been positioning the PSLV as a commercial product in a competitive global launch market. Now, international insurers operating in this market will reassess the PSLV’s risk profile and the insurance premiums could skyrocket, rendering the vehicle less affordable — a strategic embarrassment for a country aspiring to be a net provider in space.
The tenure of ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan has been characterised by a continued shift away from ISRO’s traditional culture of scientific openness toward a more guarded, bureaucratic posture. While the pressure to maintain a high launch cadence is understandable, his decision to move the C62 mission to the pad while the autopsy of its predecessor remains classified should raise tough questions about the organisation’s priorities. That the C62 mission also carried the EOS-N1 satellite, built by the DRDO and with unspecified strategic applications, could help explain a ‘rush’ if there was one. Fortunately for Mr. Narayanan, ISRO has also demonstrated the increasing reliability of its LVM-3 rocket in his time, most recently with the M6 mission in December 2025. But right now, ISRO’s and his best path to restoring confidence, and begin the painful work of rebuilding quality assurance protocols, is for the Department of Space to release the FAC report for the C61 mission. The tax-paying public and commercial stakeholders deserve to know what went wrong in 2025, whether it recurred in 2026, and why the third stage was affected again.
Published – January 13, 2026 12:20 am IST
