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ISRO’s Human Spaceflight. Preparing for Gaganyaan. Test Vehicle TV-D1

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On October 21st 2023, ISRO will conduct an in-flight abort test in preparation for its first human crewed launch in the Gaganyaan mission in 2025.

Credit ISRO

In this test, ISRO will test the mission abort mechanisms. In an emergency the crew module is separated from the launch vehicle and ejected at high speed to land softly a few kilometres away. These emergency mission aborts can occur at the launch pad or a few minutes after launch.

On 5 July 2018, ISRO conducted a pad abort test. Whilst stationary at the launch pad, the crew module was pulled away to an altitude of about 3 km and safely splashed down less than 5 mins later in the Bay of Bengal.

Today, pad abort and in-flight abort safety systems are an integral part of all crewed spaceflight missions to evacuate the crew in an emergency.

Throughout the more than six decades of human spaceflight, emergency abort mechanisms have been activated three times with human crew involved.

The first incident took place during the Soyuz 7K-T No.39 mission. It was taking a crew of two to the Salyut 4 space station on 5th April 1975. An unsuccessful separation between stage ​two and stage three compromised the mission. The Soyuz activated the abort sequence separating the crew module from the launch vehicle. Twenty minutes after launch the crew landed safely in the USSR on a snow covered hill side close to the Chinese border.

The second one was observed live by Rakesh Sharma in real-time, six months before his own flight. On 26 September 1983 Gennady Strekalov, the flight engineer and his commander Vladimir Titov survived the fire that broke out moments before the launch of Soyuz T-10-1. The built-in safety pad abort mechanism activated separating the crew module from the launch vehicle. The crew module landed safely 4 km aways. Rakesh Sharma and Ravish Malhotra watched the drama play out live. Six month later Rakesh Sharma sitting next to Gennady Strekalov launched on Soyuz-T-11 to Salyut-7 for his week long stay in space.

The third incident took place on 11 October 2018 when Soyuz M10 experienced a booster separation issue a few minutes after launch. It meant that NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin would not be able to reach their destination, the ISS. An abort was initiated, the crew capsule separated from the launch vehicle and landed safely about 20 minutes after launch.

All three instances saved lives. No lives have been lost in space but several on the journey to or during the return. All the crew on two space shuttles (Challenger 1986 and Columbia 2003) were lost. The Space Shuttle design did not incorporate a similar abort mechanism. This is the scenario being tested by ISRO on 21st October 2023.

Black Friday discounts – 33% and 66% discount

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Use the voucher codes below

BF2022_virtual for 66% discount on all ebooks
BF2022_physical for 33% discount on all paperback and hardback

1. Select the appropriate format (ebook or hard/paperback) or Ebook.
2. Add to basket
3. View the basket and enter one of the two voucher codes

Valid until midnight on 3oth November 2022. Only via the links below


Yuri Gagarin in London and Manchester		This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Hardback1-100x150.jpg
The Indian Space Programme

India’s Forgotten Rocket Pioneer

Leslie Johnson – My Personal History of The British Interplanetary Society 1933 – 1937 Liverpool

New Book – Atlas of Space Rocket Launch Sites

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ISBN 978-3-86922-758-0
Size 240 x 300 mm
272 pages
500 images
Index
Glossary
Hardcover

** Description and look-inside below **

Available from: dom-publishers.com, www.amazon.com, www.freytagberndt.com, www.mondadoristore.it, www.lehmanns.de and www.abebooks.co.uk – a variety of suppliers at many lower prices.

Learn more from podcasts: New Space India, The Spaceshow and Aviation-Xtended

Book Reviews: www.wallpaper.com, www.raumfahrer.net, flugundzeit.blog, www.ivorypress.com and collectspace.com

To purchase signed copies directly from the authors contact Brian Harvey or Gurbir Singh

The book describes primary launch sites around the world including some that are historically significant but no longer operating (e.g Peenamunde) as well as the new kids on the block (e.g Kodiak).

The book is edited by Paul Meuser who has written the foreword and sourced most of the 500 or so majestic photos of launch sites and their environments. The majority of the text is authored by Dublin-based author Brian Harvey. A prodigious writer who has been writing on space programs of numerous countries since the 1970s. Katrin Soschinski designed stunning maps, the foundation of any atlas.

Copy of the back text page and a few sample pages from the book in the slide show below. These sample pages can be downloaded here albeit the quality is way inferior to the original.

Back page text

The machines that orbit our planet live in a void environment–
however, space travel itself does not exist in a vacuum. Traveling
to space is an immense effort of humans and machines, taking
not just ‘a small step for a man’ but leaving a huge carbon
footprint in the process. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift
in which private companies and leadership figures in the form of
Billionaires are re-popularizing space travel to an extent not seen
since the space race of the USSR and USA. Space exists isolated
from the place that births its mechanical and a few select human
inhabitants. Thus we tend to forget that every single thing that
exits our atmosphere takes with it more than just its own weight
of materials when it departs our fragile blue marble.

This book offers a unique look at the physical footprints of earth’s
launch sites. With most places hidden away in jungles, deserts, or
amidst the Central Asian steppes, these places exist for the most
part out of the eye of the general public. With satellites facilitating
our modern society and a modern space age ever-present in today’s
news cycle, it is now more important than ever to think about the
imprint these undertakings leave on earth. To begin to answer
the new socio-economic questions raised by our rapid expansion
into the void, we need to look no further than follow the cracks in
the concrete of our planetary launch sites. The rusty train tracks
leading to the pad break the pristine and sterile looks of space, and
reopen our eyes to the realities of space exploration.

Birth of the Indian Space Research Organisation

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This article was first published in the May 2022 edition of the British Interplanetary Society publication – Space Chronicles.

Three weeks after its extraordinarily ambitious mission, the crew of Apollo 11 splashed down in the North Pacific, and the Indian Space research Organisation (ISRO) came into being on 15 August 1969. At that time, it was still operating under the Department of Atomic Energy, where its predecessor, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), was founded in 1962. In the same year that the Apollo programme in the USA ended, India established the Department of Space in 1972 and brought ISRO under its management. This is the ISRO that has designed, built, launched and operates the 50-plus spacecraft of the 3500 operating in space today.

Today, its space assets provide services to its security forces, but it did not start that way. India’s space programme is probably the only national space programme that began with plans only for economic and societal development. Space programmes in the USA, USSR, China and elsewhere arose to serve a national security imperative. ISRO has met many of its original objectives for more than half a century. India’s assets in space provide services for communication, television, navigation and Earth observation. For scientific research, India has Astrosat, a space telescope in Earth orbit, Chandrayaan-2 in lunar orbit and since 2014, a spacecraft in Martian orbit. Some of India’s spacecraft provide services for the international community, including remote sensing, search & rescue and navigation for civil aviation.

One objective explicitly ruled out by its first charismatic chairman, Vikram Sarabhai, in 1969 was a human spaceflight. In 2018, India’s Prime Minister announced a new goal. Called Gaganyaan, its task is to place an Indian crew in low Earth orbit using an Indian launch vehicle launched from Indian soil by 2022. A variety of issues, especially the global pandemic, have ensured that the timeline will not be met, but the programme remains active. In January 2022, S. Somanath was appointed as Chairman. As Russia’s space activities diminish, opportunities will arise for others, and India is well placed to exploit them.  

ISRO will ramp up activities that will include the launch of OneWeb’s satellites, the inaugural flight of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, the second test flight of its reusable space plane, the third mission to the moon complete with a lander and a rover and a launch abort test for its Gaganyaan programme. I expect ISRO to make a significant announcement on 15th August 2022.