ISRO’s ‘workhorse’ stumbles: PSLV-C62 loses Anvesha and 15 payloads after PS3 anomaly

Launch failures are rare for PSLV—its last catastrophic loss was the IRNSS-1H mission in Aug 2017—so two PS3 anomalies inside eight months echo the Delta II string of upper-stage mishaps in 1995-97 that forced U.S. redesigns. The event spotlights a tension in today’s space economy: legacy national workhorses are being stretched to serve booming commercial and defence demand while facing rapid innovation cycles from private players (e.g., SpaceX’s weekly Starlink flights). India’s long arc from the 1963 sounding-rocket launch to Chandrayaan-3’s 2023 lunar landing has been one of incremental reliability; a cluster of failures could slow its bid to capture a projected 10 % share of the global launch market by 2030 and dent confidence in fledgling firms like Dhruva Space whose hardware was on board. On a century timescale this incident may be a footnote, yet the response—root-cause transparency, design fixes, or bureaucratic inertia—will signal whether ISRO evolves into a resilient commercial launcher akin to Europe’s Ariane post-Vega failures, or risks being bypassed in the dawning era of reusable, high-cadence launchers.