The Agni III had a successful lift off from Wheeler Island, 108 miles northeast of Bhubaneshwar in the eastern state of Orissa but then it suffered a stage separation problem.

The Agni III was designed to have a range of 2,100 miles to 2,400 miles that would have allowed it to carry a nuclear payload to most of the cities of China including Beijing and Shanghai. The test launch had been long delayed for both technical and political reasons.

Most recently, the Indian government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been criticized domestically for delaying the launching order not to endanger approval of the U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement by the U.S. Congress.

But that agreement now looks certain to pass following overwhelming approval by the relevant committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.. And Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff assured Indian officials on his recent visit to New Delhi that testing the Agni III would not be a problem for congressional approval of the nuclear deal.

The day after the Agni III launch failure, India's Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle, or GSLV, which was making its second operational flight, was ordered destroyed when it veered out of control 40 seconds after lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota. The launch debris, including the $20 million Insat-4C communications satellite, fell into the Bay of Bengal, Space News reported Monday.

In televised interviews, Gopalan Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said the exact cause of the GSLV mishap would be known only after launch telemetry data are fully analyzed. But sources in ISRO, who did not want to be named, said there appears to have been a problem with one of the vehicle's four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters, Space News said.

Nair said the incident was "not a major setback" and that other space programs, including India's lunar orbiter set for launch in early 2008 and any contracted commercial launches, "will not be affected."

However, the Insat-4C was a major blow to India's high tech space program. Weighing 4,800 pounds, it would have been the heaviest payload sent to space from Indian soil. It was also the first of ISRO's Insat series of communications satellites to be launched using the domestically produced GSLV. All previous Insat satellites have been launched by American or European rockets.

Insat-4C was equipped with 12 Ku-band transponders and it was expected to boost direct-to home television broadcasting in India, Space News said. missions were the 1,530-kilogram GSat-1 and 1,825-kilogram GSat-2 experimental satellites, respectively.

In its first operational flight in September 2004, the vehicle successfully launched the 1,950-kilogram Edusat to support distance-learning programs.

The three-stage GSLV stands 49 meters tall and weighs 414 tons. It has a solid-fueled first stage augmented by four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters; a liquid-fueled second stage and a cryogenic upper stage supplied by Russia.

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