Wednesday, April 13 2005 10:20 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Hyderabad: India is soaring with a wide range of activities on the latest missiles and aerospace technology and many countries are looking to it for further development of this technology and work together.

"Besides Europe, two to three more countries are looking to us for development and have expressed desire to work with us," Prahlada, Director Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), said in Hyderabad.

Without naming the countries other than Europe, Pralhada told sources that these countries are willing to work on short or long-term basis.

"We in DRDL are developing futuristic technologies for next generation weapon applications. Missiles currently under development are air-to-air Astra and multi role multi purpose joint venture Brahmos. Flying a hypersonic scramjet engine demonstrator is the latest technology initiative in this Lab," the DRDL director said.

"The missile Astra is being developed and will be launched in a few months which will be capable of easily striking the targets at 80 to 90 kms," Prahlada said.

Referring to supersonic Naval Cruise Missile Brahmos being developed jointly by India and Russia, Prahlada said that these missiles are capable of hitting targets at a distance of 280 km and was confident to demonstrate it in a couple of months.

"This missile (Brahmos) is expected to be used by the Indian Navy for destroying the Naval forces of the enemy country and the Army for blasting the enemy's oil depots and bridges," according to Prahlada.

The entire range of operations, from loading the Brahmos missile in the launcher to hitting the enemy target (ships), is just a matter of a few minutes and would turn a ship, however heavy may be, to pieces, he said.

He said that the supersonic missile travels at approximately 800 to 900 metres per second and works on liquid ramjet and hits the target before the enemy could react.

The missile power comes from speed, agility, accuracy and lethality, Prahlada said adding that Brahmos has it all. The speed of this supersonic missile is three times more than the speed of Airbus or Boeing.

"The Navy in principle has placed order for these missiles. The DRDL is now looking at an actual requirement. The first missile will take about six months for production and after that every month one or two missiles can be supplied," Prahlada said.

"In fact, India is the most active nation in terms of aerospace activities, be it the missiles, the satellite or the launch vehicle or balloons. Be it a 41-kg missile or a 30-ton, the range varies as small as 4 km to as far as 280 km and has succeeded in all and is one of the most active nations in the world," DRDL Director said.

"The performance of Indian missile and aerospace activities has been very good. The number of failures divided by number of launches is the smallest in the world standards," Prahlada said.

"So far, DRDL has concentrated only on surface-to-surface, surface-to-air missiles like Agni, Prithvi, Akash and Nag but for the last few months, after the Government gave the green signal, we started work on air-to-air missile Astra to meet the Air Force demand. It is a few months old Rs 1000 crore project," he pointed out.

"We want to make a very compact air missile so that it could be fitted in a smaller aircraft like LCA as well as in Mig 29 and 290 MKI," the DRDL Director said adding "we are ready to induct it in 2010-11".

When asked, Prahlada said that there is not much of a difference between Agni I, Agni II and Agni III missiles. In fact, technically, these are of the same family. The only difference is of size, length, diametre and the quality of propellant is high to reach higher ranges.