India's Space Community Pours Out Its Emotions After ISRO's Back-To-Back PSLV Failure

India's storied "workhorse" rocket stumbled again on Monday, and with it came a cascade of reactions-some refusing to call it a failure, some meeting the blow with quiet resilience, and others openly wondering whether strategically important missions are being sabotaged. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV‑C62), carrying the EOS‑N1 Earth‑observation satellite and a cluster of commercial payloads, deviated from its planned path after "disturbances" at the end of the third stage, in the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) first mission of 2026. But the overwhelming feeling was ISRO will bounce back stronger, since the Indian space community has no other alternative but to strive for a more resilient higher orbit. The saving grace remains Launch Vehicle Mark-3 which has a one hundred percent success record, which did launch a few weeks ago from the same rocket port at Sriharikota. At 10:18 am on Monday, the 44.4‑metre, four‑stage PSLV lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, with an ambitious manifest that included a strategic hyperspectral surveillance satellite dubbed Anvesha and a Kestrel Initial Technology Demonstrator (KID) capsule slated for re‑entry and more. Less than half an hour after launch, ISRO confirmed the anomaly, setting off a familiar, sobering post‑mortem that the space community has now endured two PSLV flights in a row.