As of today, one of the urgent tasks in cosmonautics lies is narrowing impact areas of the launch vehicle detachable parts to ensure their alienation. In order to more accurately predict the impact areas position, the detachable parts aerodynamic characteristics should be included in their flight mathematical model taking into account rotation of such parts. To obtain these characteristics, it is required to develop a special experimental base making it possible to test the rotating models. Therefore, a setup was created allowing determination of the aerodynamic loads on a model rotating in the angle of attack plane in the oncoming flow. This setup was used to conduct debugging experiments on a cylindrical model with the head bluntness. Dependences of drag on the model’s angle of attack were obtained with its rotation at the angular velocities of 5 and 10 deg/s. Similar dependencies were also obtained by numerical simulation of the experiments performed in the FlowVision computational gas dynamics software package. Calculated and experimental data were compared demonstrating that the created setup provided reliable results; it could be introduced in further parametric study of the rotating model aerodynamics.

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