CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 113 of 120

Correct — D, Gaganyaan. The name is Sanskrit for sky craft, and it is ISRO's programme to demonstrate Indian human spaceflight capability by putting a crew of three into a 400-kilometre low Earth orbit for a mission of a few days and bringing them back to a landing in Indian waters. The launcher is the HLVM3, the human-rated version of ISRO's heavy-lift LVM3, fitted with a crew escape system that can pull the module clear of a failing rocket at any point in the ascent. The programme is built around a sequence of uncrewed demonstrations before anyone flies — a pad abort test in July 2018, then the TV-D1 test-vehicle abort flight on 21 October 2023, then uncrewed orbital missions. The other three names in the option set are not human spaceflight missions at all.

• (a)Vayumitra — Vyommitra is the half-humanoid robot ISRO built to ride the uncrewed Gaganyaan test flights and exercise the crew module's systems. It is an instrument of the programme, not the programme's name, and the option's spelling is a further step away.
• (b)Vikram — Vikram is the name ISRO gives to lander hardware, after Vikram Sarabhai — the Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3 lunar landers were both called Vikram. It is not a crewed mission.
• (c)Chandrayaan-3 — Chandrayaan-3 is India's third lunar mission and was entirely uncrewed; it landed near the Moon's south pole in August 2023. It is the most tempting wrong answer here because it was the ISRO mission most talked about in the same period.

Human spaceflight requires three things a satellite launch does not: a crew module that keeps people alive and re-entering safely, a human-rated launch vehicle with far tighter reliability margins and an escape system, and a ground infrastructure for training, recovery and medical support. Gaganyaan is India's programme to build all three. If it succeeds, India becomes the fourth country to launch humans into orbit on its own, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. Rakesh Sharma flew in 1984, but aboard a Soviet Soyuz, and Gaganyaan is about an Indian vehicle.

The question is a straight name-recall, and it is worth using it to fix the whole family of ISRO names: Gaganyaan for human spaceflight, Chandrayaan for the Moon, Mangalyaan for Mars, Aditya for the Sun, and Vikram for the landers. The stem's own claim is the interesting part today. The paper, set in April 2022, says the mission 'will be launched in 2023'. That did not happen — the schedule slipped repeatedly, and by late 2024 the first crewed flight was expected no earlier than 2027. What has flown is the test sequence: a pad abort test in 2018 and the TV-D1 in-flight abort demonstration on 21 October 2023. Treat any launch year printed in an old paper as the intention of the time, not as a fact about the world.

• Gaganyaan is ISRO's human spaceflight programme, planned around a crew of three in a 400-kilometre orbit.
• The launch vehicle is the HLVM3, a human-rated version of the LVM3 heavy-lift launcher, with a crew escape system.
• The mission profile ends with a landing in Indian sea waters.
• Precursor tests include the pad abort test of 5 July 2018 and the TV-D1 test-vehicle abort flight of 21 October 2023.
• The crewed flight did not take place in 2023; as of late 2024 it was expected no earlier than 2027.

• Choosing Chandrayaan-3 because it was the better-known ISRO mission of the period. It is uncrewed.
• Taking Vyommitra for the mission name. It is the robot that flies on the uncrewed tests.
• Repeating the stem's 2023 launch year as a fact. The schedule moved well past it.

As a name-the-mission item, as a statements question on crew size, orbit and launch vehicle, or as a match between ISRO missions and their destinations.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The launch vehicle being human-rated for India's Gaganyaan mission is

  • (a)PSLV
  • (b)GSLV Mk II
  • (c)LVM3
  • (d)SSLV

  Answer(c) LVM3 — ISRO's heavy-lift launcher, whose human-rated version is designated HLVM3 and carries a crew escape system.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Vyommitra, associated with India's human spaceflight programme, is

  • (a)the crew module of the Gaganyaan mission
  • (b)a humanoid robot built to fly on the uncrewed test missions
  • (c)the astronaut training centre at Bengaluru
  • (d)the recovery ship for crew module splashdown

  Answer(b) a humanoid robot built to fly on the uncrewed test missions — it is meant to exercise the crew module's systems before people fly in it.