After PSLV setbacks stall launches, Isro hopes to bounce back following expert panel report

“A National level expert committee constituted is reviewing the reason for the anomaly in the PSLV Vehicle,” Isro said in a public statement on February 25, 2026.

The expert committee is due to submit a report on its findings by June this year.

A committee headed by former principal scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, Prof. Vijayraghavan, has identified the issues affecting PSLV and is working to resolve them, multiple Isro sources said.

“The expert committee is looking at the findings and Isro will bounce back like it has done many times in its history,” a senior Isro official said on the sidelines of an international conference on spacecraft mission operations held in Bengaluru.

The recent problems with PSLV have been traced to anomalies in its third stage, observed in both the failed PSLV-C61 and PSLV-C62 missions.

PSLV issues

Explaining the PSLV-C62 failure on January 12, 2026, Isro chairman V Narayanan said the rocket’s performance was normal up to the third stage, but disturbances occurred near the end of that phase, causing a deviation in its trajectory. “Close to the end of the third stage, we are seeing some disturbances in the vehicle, and there was a deviation in the path of the vehicle, and the mission could not proceed in the expected path,” he said.

Isro also stated that the PSLV-C62 mission faced an anomaly during the end of the PS3 stage and that a detailed analysis had been initiated. After the PSLV-C61 failure on May 18, 2025, Isro noted that the mission performed normally up to the second stage, but an issue with the third stage prevented it from completing.

Isro officials have suggested in some public talks that a “slight manufacturing error” was responsible for the failure of the PSLV-C61 in May 2025, though this has not been officially confirmed. Meanwhile, Union Minister of State for Space Jitendra Singh has indicated that the causes of the failures of the PSLV-C61 and C62 were different and that experts’ findings indicated different causes.

In a break from established practice, Isro did not present the findings of the Failure Analysis Committee regarding the PSLV-C61 launch failure before proceeding with the PSLV-C62 launch.

Setbacks to Isro programmes

These setbacks have had broader consequences, delaying multiple missions that depend on PSLV launches.

“There cannot be any launches where there are questions regarding the PSLV. These have to be resolved before Isro can proceed with any launch. We are confident that this is likely to happen in the next couple of months,” a former space agency official said last week.

The proposed launch of the NavIC NVS-3 satellite intended to replace failed satellites in the constellation is indirectly affected. Though NavIC satellites are launched by the GSLV rocket and not directly affected by the PSLV failures, former ISRO officials say this launch is also affected as no satellite launch can be attempted until issues with the PSLV are resolved.

Also impacted are the maiden flight of a privately manufactured PSLV and missions of the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), which uses a stage derived from the PSLV’s third stage.

Union Minister of State for Space Singh said in Parliament in July 2025 that the new generation NavIC satellite “NVS-03 is planned to be launched by the end of 2025” and “subsequently, with a gap of six months, NVS-04 & NVS-05 are planned to be launched”.

The NavIC programme suffered a setback last month when the satellite IRNSS-1F reached the end of its lifespan and failed. This reduced the system to three operational satellites, below the minimum requirement of four needed to provide reliable positioning, navigation, and tracking services.

Similarly, the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) programme, which uses the solid booster derived from PSLV’s PS3 stage and is positioned as a low-cost launch vehicle capable of carrying out large numbers of launches into low Earth orbit in a short span of time, was also affected by the PSLV setbacks.

It failed in its first launch on August 7, 2022, while carrying a lightweight earth observation satellite, before successful flights were conducted in 2023 and 2024.

Two days before SSLV’s maiden successful flight in February 2023, Isro published details of the findings of the failure analysis committee for the failed 2022 flight, which indicated a software glitch as the cause of failure.

“Subsequent detailed analysis of flight events and observations ranging from countdown, lift-off, propulsion performance, stage separations and satellite injection revealed that there was a vibration disturbance for a short duration on the Equipment Bay (EB) deck during second stage (SS2) separation, that affected the Inertial Navigation System (INS), resulting in declaring the sensors faulty by the logic in Fault Detection & Isolation (FDI) software,” Isro said in the note.

In September last year, Isro, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) signed a deal with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) to transfer SSLV technology for large-scale manufacturing.

Meanwhile, the private PSLV programme has been under development for several years. An industry consortium of HAL and Larsen & Toubro is building the first privately manufactured PSLV, known as PSLV-XL N1. The project has already completed several stages, including the development of solid motors.

The contract for the private manufacture of PSLV was signed in 2022 at the Bengaluru Space Expo by the HAL-L&T consortium. The contract mandates the end-to-end production of five PSLV XL rockets.