ISRO's Pushpak Space Plane Landed Itself Three Times After Helicopter Drops From 4.5 km, and the Orbital Flight It Was Rehearsing Still Has No Date

ISRO’s winged test vehicle has landed itself on a runway at Chitradurga in Karnataka three times, on 2 April 2023, 22 March 2024 and 23 June 2024. Each time an Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter carried it to 4.5 km and let it go. The same winged body flew all three.

The next step, a flight to orbit and back, has not happened. ISRO’s own papers describe that vehicle as under development, and none of them gives a launch date.

The 2016 flight that never reached a runway

An earlier flight came first. On 23 May 2016, ISRO flew its Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD) from Sriharikota in a mission called HEX, a date the Department of Space’s annual report records.

Spaceflight Now reported that a booster rocket took the 6.5 m long, roughly 1,750 kg vehicle to about 65 km, that its top speed exceeded Mach 5, and that it splashed into the Bay of Bengal about 450 km from the launch site. The report adds that Indian officials reportedly did not plan to recover it.

According to ISRO’s page on the 2023 landing, HEX tested the re-entry of a hypersonic sub-orbital vehicle, and precise landing on a runway “was an aspect not included” in it. The landing experiments (LEX) took up that missing piece.

2 April 2023: LEX-01

ISRO’s account gives the sequence in Indian Standard Time. At 7:10 am the vehicle left the ground under the Chinook as a slung load and climbed to 4.5 km above mean sea level. The vehicle’s own Mission Management Computer released it at a down range of 4.6 km, once ten release conditions covering position, velocity, altitude and body rates were met. Touchdown on the Aeronautical Test Range airstrip came at 7:40 am.

ISRO calls the vehicle a space plane with a low lift-to-drag ratio, which means it glides poorly and has to come in steeply and fast. Landing speed was 350 km/h, by ISRO’s account, and the landing parameters were meant to match what an orbital re-entry vehicle would see on its return path.

Among the systems ISRO listed are a pseudolite system (ground transmitters that act like local navigation satellites), a Ka-band radar altimeter, a NavIC receiver, indigenous landing gear, honeycomb fins and a brake parachute. It says this was the first time anywhere that a winged body was carried by helicopter to 4.5 km and released for an autonomous runway landing.

The 2023 page calls the craft simply the RLV and does not use the name Pushpak.

22 March 2024: LEX-02, with a stronger airframe

The second test took place at 7:10 am on 22 March 2024. ISRO’s release is the first of the three that names the vehicle, saying the winged vehicle was “called Pushpak”. Release came at 4.5 km, this time 4 km from the runway, and had to correct both cross-range (sideways) and down-range errors. ISRO says it started from off-nominal release conditions, meaning it was not set up on the ideal path. News On AIR gave the vehicle’s length as 6.5 m.

Two things changed. After LEX-01, ISRO says, the airframe and landing gear were strengthened to take higher landing loads. And the winged body and all flight systems from LEX-01 were reused after certification, which ISRO presented as a demonstration of reuse.

The director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Dr S Unnikrishnan Nair, said the repeat success showed ISRO had mastered the terminal phase of the flight, meaning final manoeuvring, landing and energy management, in fully autonomous mode. He called it a critical step toward orbital re-entry missions.

23 June 2024: LEX-03, a harder drop

The third test used the same 7:10 am slot and the same 4.5 km release height, from a point 4.5 km from the runway. The cross-range offset was 500 m against 150 m on LEX-02, and ISRO says the winds were more severe.

Landing speed, ISRO reports, was above 320 km/h, set against 260 km/h for a commercial aircraft and 280 km/h for a typical fighter. A brake parachute cut the speed to nearly 100 km/h, after which the wheel brakes stopped the vehicle, while the rudder and nose-wheel steering held it on the runway. For navigation the vehicle fused data from an inertial sensor, a radar altimeter, a flush air data system, the pseudolites and NavIC.

According to the release, LEX-03 flew the LEX-02 winged body and flight systems without modification, and that the mission validated a guidance algorithm for correcting errors along and across the flight path, which it calls essential for the future orbital re-entry mission. Dr Nair said the consistent success raised ISRO’s confidence in the technologies needed for those missions. Deccan Herald, reporting the same day, said ISRO would build on the tests to develop its orbital reusable vehicle, the RLV-ORV.

The two landing speeds, 350 km/h in 2023 and over 320 km/h in 2024, are as ISRO’s pages for the two flights give them.

What ISRO says about the orbital flight

In the Lok Sabha on 24 July 2024, the Minister of State Dr Jitendra Singh said ISRO had begun development work on a mission to demonstrate the orbital flight and re-entry of Pushpak. The reply added that Pushpak could be used as a reusable flyback upper stage of a heavier launch vehicle, and that for now ISRO was focused on the orbital flight and re-entry and on proving reliability through multiple missions.

ISRO’s chairman, Dr V Narayanan, inaugurated a landing gear drop test facility at VSSC in Thiruvananthapuram on 4 April 2025. ISRO’s page says it is for qualifying the deployable landing gear of Pushpak for the RLV Orbital Re-entry Experiment, RLV-OREX. In that experiment Pushpak will be launched to orbit on an ascent vehicle and, after a few orbits, will re-enter and land on a runway. The rig can simulate landing speeds up to 360 km/h, drop masses up to 2,000 kg and wet or icy runways.

A Rajya Sabha reply of 27 March 2025 describes a winged body Orbital Re-entry Vehicle, or ORV, launched on an ascent vehicle. A reply of 23 July 2026 uses nearly the same words and lists the vehicle among technologies ISRO has “undertaken the development” of. These documents use RLV-OREX, ORV and “Pushpak” for the programme, and none says whether the orbital vehicle will be the airframe that flew at Chitradurga or a new one.

What the 2025-26 annual report records

The Department of Space’s Annual Report 2025-2026 gives the most detailed status. In it, the architecture for the ORV’s propulsion and avionics is described as finalised, and wind tunnel tests for the ascent phase were done at the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL). The thermal protection material has been finalised, and a heat test on a carbon-silicon carbide specimen was carried out in a plasma wind tunnel.

The report also lists shock tunnel tests, wind tunnel tests at Mach 6 to 10, development testing of a 200 N attitude-control thruster, and preliminary guidance and control design for the descent from de-boost to touchdown. Work on the hot structures, meaning the wings, elevons, rudders and tail with their leading edges, is “in progress”. A safety section records a cumulative 515 seconds of hot testing of the 200 N engine for the RLV-ORV.

What has not been demonstrated

The landing tests started from a helicopter at 4.5 km, so there was no rocket ascent, no orbit and no re-entry heating in any of the three flights. ISRO’s own wording is that they simulated the approach and landing of a vehicle returning from space. The 2016 flight went to about 65 km and past Mach 5, and ISRO says a precise runway landing was not part of it.

Still to be flown, then, are the ascent vehicle carrying the ORV, orbital flight, a re-entry through the heat, and a runway landing by deployable landing gear after all of that. The annual report shows ground testing of several of these, not a flight.

VSSC also leads Gaganyaan, the human spaceflight programme covered in our Gaganyaan piece, and the annual report lists the winged RLV among its major programmes. Other ISRO demonstrations have their own pages on tuput, among them the SpaDeX docking mission and the agency’s record on a small budget. The March 2025 reply also records that the government has approved a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle with a recoverable first stage, a separate project from Pushpak.

The most recent official document we found, the Rajya Sabha reply of 23 July 2026, gives no date for the orbital flight.