The Indian space agency has a roadmap of 10 launches per year for the next three financial years or a total of 30 launches in the period, its chief A.S.Kiran Kumar said on Monday.

The Indian Space Research Organisation chief, who met with his team here and discussed the test of the demo reusable launch vehicle, told media persons that this it would take place in the latter half of October.

"This would approximately cost Rs.3 crore. The whole purpose of testing the demo vehicle is the first step towards designing the actual one. The demo vehicle will travel around 90 kms," he said.

Kiran Kumar said their target is to achieve 10 launches a year. "By the end of this fiscal, we expect to finish seven launches and then to have 10 launches every year in the next three fiscals," he said.

On the SAARC satellite, the ISRO chief said that there was a meeting with five member countries including Pakistan in this connection last month.

"Every country was told about this and we explained to them the different applications and the configuration is now being discussed and we expect to launch this in December 2016," he said.

Kiran Kumar said that the capacity expansion of the ISRO centre was linked to the resources that they get, noting that in the first three years of the 12th Five Year Plan, they received around Rs.4,000 crore each, and in the next two years, were expecting a higher allocation of around Rs.6,000 crore.

He also said that the ISRO is making use of the good number of its retired officials and they are often called in when discussions are held.

On the recent hacking of the website of ISRO's commercial arm Antrix, he said the service provider that was managing the website was changed and the site was under construction by "our own people". "There has been no loss of information," he said.

Source: Indo-Asia News Service