The most crucial moment is the first 8.5 minutes of ascent in any launch, said American astronaut Colonel Benjamin Alvin Drew, NASA liaison to the Department of Space.

BANGALORE: The most crucial moment is the first 8.5 minutes of ascent in any launch, said American astronaut Colonel Benjamin Alvin Drew, NASA liaison to the Department of Space. He was speaking to The New Indian Express on the sidelines of the symposium on human space flight programme organised by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Astronautical Society of India here on Thursday.

He said that 99% of things that go wrong, happen in that stage. Citing other examples from the past, he said that if the staging (where the stages come off in a timely sequence) goes wrong, there is a chance of two stages hitting each other and tumbling. Furthermore, he said that if the solar arrays do not roll out according to the orientation planned, the batteries will burn out quickly. 

Colonel Drew has logged 612 hours in space. He has worked on NASA’s International Space Station and has been on two space missions. He gave two thumbs up to ISRO’s Gaganyaan rocket and crew module design, and said that he could have picked this design, had he been given a choice. To Drew, India’s dream of putting humans in space using indigenous technology is nothing short of a success, because of the copious amount of research that has gone into the design and development of the crew module and the rocket.

For instance, the gumdrop shaped body of the crew module, where the height is greater than the width and the bottom of the drum is larger than the top, will always ensure that it lands tail first during descent, no matter which position it enters the atmosphere. The crew module is the capsule which will shield the four astronauts in space. 

The positioning of the capsule inside the ‘fairing’ or the none cone that protects the spacecraft, saves the capsule from space debris till the final stage and would not be required to deal with aerodynamic loads as its not in the wind stream, he said. For space tourism, the fairing would have windows so that occupants can look outside, he said. 

‘No Thumb Rule For Parachutes’

Drew said that there was no thumb-rule for developing a parachute and even the most professional designer can go wrong, hence one has to keep iterating and tweaking it as per needs.