11 replies on “India Does Pad Abort Test For Its Crew Module (Video)”

  1. I honestly did not know until watching this video that India was working toward having a human spaceflight program.

    1. 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. 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

    1. 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. 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 ?

    1. Could the early deployment provide a way to heavily stress the stabilizers thus providing another data point?

    2. 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. 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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