NEW DELHI — Indo-Russian consortium BrahMos Aerospace has plans to develop a Mach 7 hypersonic missile, the BrahMos 2. “We have established a lead in supersonic missiles,” says Praveen Pathak, general manager for market promotion and export at BrahMos Aerospace. “Hypersonic vehicles with multi-use will reduce the cost [of] putting payload in orbit. It could deliver the payload at multiple points and it can come back.”

India’s military procurement plans are likely to be hampered by a minimal raise in budget allocation for acquisition in the next financial year. Though India has proposed increasing its defense spending by 10% to 2.24 trillion rupees ($36.2 billion) in its 2014-15 fiscal year, which begins April 1, the capital allocation earmarked to buy new arms and weapons systems has been increased by only a paltry 3.2%, or 28.47 billion rupees, to 895.87 billion rupees. The remaining 1.34 trillion rupees will go toward payment of salaries and other expenses.

NEW DELHI — India’s first manned space flight program has received a major boost with a higher budgetary allocation and development of a crew module structural assembly. The federal interim budget, announced on Feb. 17, increased the allocation for the human space flight program from 92 million rupees ($1.5 million) to 170 million rupees. The increase comes days after state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) handed over the crew module to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).