Your own spaceplane, India, really? Hadn't you better try and feed the hundreds of millions of starving people in your country, or build a domestic fighter jet that is fit for actual service in your airforce?

It amazes me that they can't build a 3 mile long runway. Seriously have to do a sea landing because you can't knuckle down and expand a military runway by a couple miles?
Tells me this thing is already underfunded.

Good grief. the Biggest problem is can't a 3 mile landing strip. Simply close off a straight highway when it is ready to land.

Why not an 'Space Shuttle' made of concrete? Cement was shown withstanding temperatures above 1000º C for hours in some building fires, and in ship making, above 10 metres of lenght, and with a wall thickness of 7 cm, concrete is competitive in buoyancy to hull weight ratio to traditional steel or wooden ships. Prices of these materials are unknown to me. In concrete boatbulding, to finish a small standard fisheries ship, 72 h of continued work and a team of 60 persons are needed (FAO fisheries data). The Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany even built succesfully a car of concrete, see: 'A car made of concrete -And it works!', 'The Indian Concrete Journal', 2004, pags 43 and 44. Of course, not all climates are good for cement setting, and it was recently discovered that the ability of Roman concrete to emerge well after thousands of years under Sea water was due to its formulation with volcano ashes.

A most convenient inconvenience I think!

Silicon is 10x stronger than concrete, and handles 1600 degrees... neither is exactly "light" though...

The cost of the 3 mi. runway could easily be folded into the program cost. The cost of launching the concrete defeats the savings of materials cost many times over. Maybe this could use the original Space Shuttle concept of a short range turbojet for landing. Then could use regular airport for powered landing.

@mhpr262 It's projects like this that can help alleviate poverty in India. They provide work and eventually profit for ISRO that goes back into the economy.

Really?! The country can't manage to have toilets or a workable sanitation system, but they can have a rocket.

I oppose all public works, i.e., theft (tax) to pay for a bureaucrats pet projects. That said, this is less onerous than weapons, especially nukes.
This and a lot more could be paid for easily by a "Hong Kong" business policy, i.e., a free market economy. The irony is that even the corrupt politicians/bureaucrats would benefit financially, if only they could loosen their stranglehold on business. Power, once given is very addictive, so I know it will never be given up willingly. The public must force change, e.g., give the power back to innovators/entrepreneurs, where it belongs. Of course, that would go agains the world trend of authoritarianism. Too bad for the world.