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The RLV-TD winged body spacecraft takes off Monday morning. (credit: ISRO)

For the last several years, India has been making steady progress with its space program, including the successful insertion of a spacecraft into Mars orbit in 2014, something previously only the United States, Soviet Union, and the European Space Agency had accomplished. Now the second-most populous country in the world has taken its first significant step toward developing a reusable launch vehicle.

On Monday,  the country's space program launched a winged body aerospace vehicle on its maiden test flight from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on the east coast of India. The Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, declared the test flight a success.

At 7am local time, the HS9 solid rocket booster fired for 91.1 seconds, lifting the RLV-TD winged body spacecraft to above 50km. After separating from the booster, the spacecraft crested to an altitude of 65km, nearly two-thirds of the way to outer space, before beginning its descent. During reentry the vehicle reached speeds of Mach 5 as it glided down to a pre-defined location in Bay of Bengal, about 450km from the launch site. Indian officials said the vehicle's first test flight successfully demonstrated technologies such as autonomous navigation, guidance and control, as well as a reusable thermal protection system.

(credit: California Department of Food and Agriculture)

The USDA will receive a record fine against a company that supplies life science researchers with critical materials. Santa Cruz Biotechnology had been facing a variety of animal welfare charges related to lapses in the care of the research animals it kept. The $3.5-million fine comes as part of a settlement that will end the company's issues with federal regulators. While the company won't admit any wrongdoing, the settlement calls for it to lose its license to keep two species of research animals.

Santa Cruz Biotechnology creates antibodies to specific proteins, which researchers then purchase in order to isolate and identify those proteins. The antibodies themselves are often created in furry little factories: research animals that have received immunizations against the protein in question. The animals will then continue making useful antibodies for as long as they live; the antibodies can be isolated using blood samples.

After some initial inspections suggested that Santa Cruz was keeping some animals alive after the point that they should be euthanized due to things like tumors, further searches revealed that the company was being generally shifty about its animal records keeping. An entire herd of goats was never declared in any of the company's paperwork, and the company once cleared out almost 4,000 research animals in advance of some USDA hearings.