Gaganyaan recovery team trains on modules developed by Tata Elxsi

Bengaluru: ISRO, which on July 20 entered the second phase of crew recovery training for its Gaganyaan mission, has been using crew modules developed by private industry in Bengaluru. Tata Elxsi a global design company, has designed and created two crew module recovery models (CMRMs) for recovery team training of the space mission.

Aditya S Chikodi, business head and GM of design & innovation, Tata Elxsi, said: "This is for the very first time that ISRO has involved an industry participant to do complete mechanical design and engineering model, which will simulate the crew module that would go to space and then bring the crew back to the Earth in the safest way possible. In order to do this, they just gave us a brief saying that this is what they required and they wanted to have these modules developed for certain space-specific specifications.”

Pointing out that one of the key requirements of Gaganyaan is the crew’s safe recovery, which must be carried out with minimum lapse of time, the firm said this is where its CMRM come into use. “For recovery team training, CMRMs designed and fabricated by us, which simulated the mass, centre of gravity, outer dimensions, interfaces and externals of the actual crew module, were used, both in Kochi and Visakhapatnam,” Chikodi said.

As reported by TOI earlier, Gaganyaan recovery trial operations entered the second phase with ISRO and Indian Navy starting harbour trials at the naval dockyard in Visakhapatnam. Before this, phase 1 of the trials was carried out at the navy’s Water Survival Training Facility in Kochi.

“Our team, after analysing ISRO’s requirements, came out with a design. They also looked at the material that was required. Of course, there was some input from ISRO on materials. We looked at the supply chain, sourcing of the material, geometry and engineering of the parts and specific nitty-gritty. We needed to take care of different elements,” Chikodi said.

Aside from Elxsi designing and building the modules, an important takeaway from this ISRO project was creation of a local ecosystem in Bengaluru. “We had to find partners locally within the ecosystem here in Bengaluru, who could actually fabricate this on our behalf, do the necessary build out and also help us with testing and validation. This was done and all the load test cases were tested and validated by us, post which two of these models were delivered to ISRO, which they took to Kochi and Visakhapatnam,” he said.