BENGALURU: As part of a series of tests lined up to human rate the systems for Gaganyaan , India’s proposed human spaceflight system scheduled for 2022, Isro has designed a new test vehicle for the testing of crew escape system.Confirming the development to TOI, Isro chairman K Sivan said that the new vehicle is ready for testing and will be used to ensure that a flawless mechanism for crew escape is in place before the mission.“Crew escape system is a very important aspect of Gaganyaan as it helps deal with any exigency during travel or stay of the astronauts. We have to be able to safely shift the crew away from any incident and bring them back to safety. For this, we need to do multiple tests like the pad abort test (PAT) or in-flight test,” Sivan said.He added that the new test vehicle has been built for in-flight escape of the crew. “The propulsion will be on top of the crew module so that it enables to pull the crew away by lifting the module and take them to a safe place,” Sivan said, adding that the space agency would also be testing the critical parachute deployment procedures this year, which is very complicated.Dmitry Loskutov, director general, Glavkosmos, which is training the Indian astronaut-elects in Russia had told TOI: “They (astronauts) will be trained for the case of abnormal landing of the descent module in various climate and geography zones, i.e., if the descent module lands in marshy and/or forested terrain in winter, or in a river or sea.”Senior officials from Isro’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) and Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) said that multiple teams are working on human rating of the GSLV-MkIII and that they should have theoretically met all parametres by August-September this year. The full-fledged simulations will begin thereafter.“The goal is to introduce all the changes to the system to achieve human rating by that time. But we will have to go beyond simulations and do at least three actual test launches,” one of them said.Sivan said that Isro is making certain changes on the S-200, L-110 and C-20 propulsion systems, and added: “We should be ready before the unmanned flight.” Since rockets are autonomous after launch Isro cannot tolerate any failure. So, a series of tests to make it reliable, including tests of the various regimes of flight, stability et al will be done first.Human rating of all systems is the most essential part of the programme, and as reported by TOI earlier, Isro would spend at least 50% of the Rs 10,000 crore allocated for the project on this aspect. The agency will build three sets of rockets, crew and service module for the project, and all of them have to be human-rated.In a presentation made by VSSC director S Somnath he had said: “The reliability targeted for human-rated launch vehicles is 0.99, which means statistically only 1 out of 100 can be unreliable. And, for the crew escape system, which is very crucial, we are targeting greater than 0.998, which means we want almost 100 reliability.”Isro is also working on a series of redundancies that will aid in bringing the crew back even if one of the systems fails. And for this, the most important thing is failure detection and on-board intelligence that tells the system to abort. For this, new algorithms to go into the system are being developed. While control systems, avionics and sensors are ready, Isro will also build an indigenous computer and microprocessor.