Second Vehicle Assembly Building at Sriharikota Approved By the Union Cabinet of India

The Union Cabinet of India on 12 September 2013 approved the decision for realisation of Second Vehicle Assembly Building at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota (SDSC-SHAR) at an estimated cost of 363.95 crore Rupees. This amount will also have the foreign exchange component of 7 crore Rupees.

Objective of the Second Vehicle Assembly Building (SVAB)

• The Second Vehicle Assembly Building will facilitate enhanced launch frequency of PSLV and GSLV by helping in parallel integration operations.
• It will also provide redundancy to existing Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for integration of GSLV MK-III and also as a prime integration facility for third launch pad and future general launch vehicles.

The project teams which are formed by the Department of Space at SDSC-SHAR will realise the systems through the contractor by floating tenders package wise. For this purpose, there will be an engagement of an engineering consultant in order to carry out configuration development, detailed engineering and preparation of tender documents by dividing the total work into various packages. The realisation target of SVAB is 42 months.

It is also important to note that the SDSC SHAR at present has the two operation launch pads which provide launch support for the satellites. An increasing demand for the launch of satellites from Sriharikota has been observed in the recent years.