Enlarge / A forward-facing camera on the top of an Indian launch vehicle captured this view of a Gaganyaan test spacecraft firing its abort engine to lift off from the rocket.
In 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed his country to developing its own capability to send astronauts into orbit, an achievement that would make India the fourth country with an independent human spaceflight program. On Saturday, that ambition moved one step closer to reality with a successful test of the human-rated spacecraft’s launch-abort system.
This is a series of rocket motors and parachutes designed to propel the spacecraft away from a malfunctioning launch vehicle – a dramatic maneuver that would save the lives of everyone on board. Apparently, Indian officials were thrilled with the results of the test flight.
“We started the journey of Gaganyaan with this first launch of the test vehicle abort sequence and this will be repeated several times under different conditions,” said Sreedhara Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organization. “We will also conduct an unmanned Gaganyaan spacecraft mission (orbital mission) soon, early next year.”
An unpressurized model of the Gaganyaan spacecraft, which mimics the shape and mass of the real capsule, launched on a single-stage station from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s east coast at 12:30 a.m. EDT (04:30 UTC) on Saturday. The booster accelerated the capsule to a speed of Mach 1.2, slightly faster than the speed of sound, and then an automated command triggered a simulated launch abort.
The escape maneuver was timed around the moment the rocket was exposed to the most extreme aerodynamic forces of flight. This is the most challenging time for a launch abort. With solid propellant burning, a high-altitude escape engine ignited for a few seconds to push the 10,000-pound (4.5-ton) capsule away from the tip of its booster. The capsule and its launch abort system rolled to an altitude of about 55,000 feet (16.9 kilometers), then the capsule separated and deployed a series of parachutes, finally deploying three large main chutes to advance about six miles (10 kilometers). to slow down on the coast and react to water.
An Indian Navy ship in the Bay of Bengal retrieved the capsule to return it to ISRO engineers for inspection. There was no one on board the Gaganyaan capsule during the test flight on Saturday. This flight was similar to the aborted tests of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and NASA’s Orion capsule.
Enlarge / The Indian Navy has recovered the Gaganyaan capsule from the Bay of Bengal.
Modi wrote in a post on social media platform
Under Modi’s nationalist prime minister, India’s space exploration has made great strides, including a series of successful launches, missions to the moon and Mars, and the full rollout of its own regional satellite navigation system, begun under a previous government. An independent Indian human spaceflight program would put India in an exclusive club alongside the United States, China and Russia, and there is room for debate about whether India could soon catapult ahead of Russia in space travel.
safety first
“As far as the Gaganyaan program is concerned, this is the first major milestone,” said R. Hutton, mission director of the Gaganyaan program, in his remarks after the test flight on Saturday. “In Gaganyaan, crew safety is the most important factor.”
Saturday’s mission – dubbed TV-D1 as the first demonstration flight of India’s new “test vehicle” – is the first of four atmospheric launch abort tests that Indian officials say will fully test the performance of the crew escape system at various stages of the launch. The new “test vehicle” that started the abort test on Saturday is derived from a hydrazine-fueled booster used in another Indian rocket.
Indian engineers did not attempt to recover the launch vehicle on Saturday, but officials said the single-stage rocket could become a technological testbed for other programs, including vertical takeoff and landing, a precursor to future reusable launch vehicles.
“Although the Gaganyaan vehicle is completely robust and reliable, we cannot leave anything to chance. So if a malfunction occurs, there has to be a so-called crew escape system in the launch vehicle that takes care of it. “We will safely take the crew module away and land it,” Hutton said on Saturday. “That’s exactly what was shown today during this first use of the test vehicle.”
ISRO completed a successful launch pad abort test in 2018, in which the escape system propelled a capsule into the sky from a fixed launch point on the ground, simulating a launch pad abort.
The Indian government has allocated about $1.1 billion for Gaganyaan, which means “celestial vehicle” in Sanskrit. Indian engineers worked on the preliminary design of a human-capable spacecraft for several years before Modi announced in 2018 that a new Indian-made space capsule would carry an Indian astronaut into orbit by 2022.
India has not made this schedule. Officials have attributed the delays to the COVID pandemic and the technical complexities of developing a crewed spacecraft. Somanath, who heads India’s space agency, said ISRO is on track to launch an unmanned Gaganyaan mission into low Earth orbit early next year to conduct a comprehensive test from launch to re-entry to water drop.
The unmanned orbital mission needs to be repeated “at least twice, maybe even more,” Somanath said at an Indian conference in June. “All of this is dependent on success. If something goes wrong here, corrections and further launches will be required. Therefore, I do not give a date for the start of the (first) manned mission. That’s not important at the moment. Our focus is to do what is necessary to get to that point.”
Enlarge / S. Unnikrishnan Nair, head of the Indian Space Center Vikram Sarabhai, poses with a scale model of the LVM3 rocket with the Gaganyaan spacecraft in launch configuration.
Still, in a briefing with Modi last week, Somanath suggested that the launch of the first Gaganyaan manning mission is now scheduled for 2025. In a statement, Modi’s office said ISRO was planning around 20 major tests, including three unmanned missions on India’s LVM3 rocket, the country’s most powerful launch vehicle. During the last LVM3 launch in July, the rocket flew with modified boosters and engines designed to operate at higher power reserves.
The ultimate goal of the Gaganyaan program is to deploy a spacecraft that can fly a crew of three at an altitude of 250 miles (400 kilometers) for up to a week.
Do it alone (mostly).
Somanath said in June that India was pursuing the Gaganyaan program “using our own knowledge, our own capabilities, our own industry.”
India has extensive experience in launching rockets and flying satellites. In August, India became the fourth country to make a soft landing on the moon with the Chandrayaan 3 mission. ISRO has also sent a space probe to Mars.
But one area of human spaceflight in which India has little experience is life support, the complicated arrangement of parts to produce oxygen and eliminate carbon dioxide and moisture in the cabin’s breathing air, provide drinking water, protect against fire and to provide astronauts with an on-board toilet. Before Indian engineers launch a crew mission, they want to make sure all these systems are working in space.
“It is a difficult technology that very few nations have,” Somanath said. “Today it is only available in three countries and we have asked them for help in developing it, but the help is not coming. You must understand that it is not easy to build it yourself. Some of them offered it, but they told (us). Development would take a few years and would involve exorbitant costs.
“After analyzing the value of these offerings, we decided that we will not rely on them,” Somanath said in June. “We will develop it ourselves. The work has started and we have reached a certain state where we have now integrated it and started testing it. That are great news. But again, it’s the first prototype we just created.”
The Indian space agency is also developing pressure suits that the astronauts will wear during their mission. But India has also purchased Russian spacesuits in case the Indian-made suits are not ready for the Gaganyaan crew’s first flight.
Four Indian Air Force test pilots are training for flights into space, although the Indian space agency has not revealed their identities.
As a prelude to the Gaganyaan program, NASA and ISRO have agreed to train Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and an Indian crew member will fly on a short mission to the International Space Station next year. According to Indian media, the four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021.
Somanath said Indian officials would build their own astronaut training program based on lessons learned from the United States and Russia.
Enlarge / A single-stage booster launched the model of the Gaganyaan spacecraft used in the in-flight abort test on Saturday.
In his public statements, Modi says the Gaganyaan program is not an end but a means to even more ambitious goals in space. Last week, Modi announced that India should start building its own space station in low Earth orbit by 2035 and send the first Indian to the moon by 2040. This roadmap is similar to that of China, India’s Asian rival, as Ars reported last week.
India’s government has also signaled interest in closer cooperation with NASA. In June, India signed the US-led Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles between like-minded nations to promote peaceful space exploration. Beyond the flight of an Indian to the International Space Station next year, NASA and ISRO have not yet announced details of future cooperation in human spaceflight.
A large rocket called Next Generation Launch Vehicle, a new launch pad and additional Chandrayaan robotic missions to the moon are also in India’s plans, Modi said, although details about the new rocket are few.