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Exploration

India Does Pad Abort Test For Its Crew Module (Video)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 7, 2018
Filed under

Keith Cowing

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “India Does Pad Abort Test For Its Crew Module (Video)”

  1. MarcNBarrett says:
    July 7, 2018 at 4:47 pm
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    I honestly did not know until watching this video that India was working toward having a human spaceflight program.

    • fcrary says:
      July 8, 2018 at 2:12 am
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      I hadn’t either, but I tend to pay more attention to planetary science. But, overall, the US news media does a poor job of covering non-US spaceflight. You’d hardly guess Japan is in the middle of their second asteroid sample return mission, that an UAE Mars orbiter (and a serious science one, not an “engineering test”) is in development, or that China will send a lander/rover to the lunar far side later this year.

  2. PRex says:
    July 9, 2018 at 1:38 pm
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    It appears that the main chutes risers were cut well before the water landing and the CM was in freefall from a considerable height. Could this have been intentional? I’ve not seen anything from ISRO about this and usually they’re upfront about failures or off-nominal behavior

    • PRex says:
      July 23, 2018 at 5:55 pm
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      Thinking about this some more, I suspect the risers were cut early (leaving the CM in freefall) to run something like a water landing impact qualification test. Thoughts anyone?

  3. rb1957 says:
    July 9, 2018 at 2:20 pm
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    Agreed a nice surprise. A couple of observations …
    1) the stabilizers, deployed before ignition. How much time does this add ? Why deploy early, and give the rockets something more to work against (other than getting the capsule away from danger) ?
    2) detaching the parachutes prior to impact with the sea. I can see that you want to avoid the chutes falling on top of the capsule; is this common practice ?

    • Michael Spencer says:
      July 10, 2018 at 7:39 pm
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      Could the early deployment provide a way to heavily stress the stabilizers thus providing another data point?

    • Robert van de Walle says:
      July 14, 2018 at 6:43 pm
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      I’d guess the grid fins are a substitute for the rest of the rocket. If this capsule were atop a launcher already moving in the air the capsule would have some aerodynamic forces to help it remain stabilized during abort.

  4. Michael Spencer says:
    July 9, 2018 at 5:52 pm
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    I guess I thought that the introduction of “grid fins” into the air stream as a control surface was an invention of ElonCo. Could one of the rocket engineers hereabouts comment?

    (I do know/think that SX has made many applicable patents freely available; perhaps this is part of the picture?)

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