 Hello and welcome to Newsweek. Today we have with us the Raghunandan who has discussed earlier with us on various issues of aerodotics, aircraft, rockets and so on. Today we are going to discuss the latest launch which is being called a space launch but is also being called a sub-orbital launch of Richard Branson's new toy, the Virgin Galactica spacecraft. Raghun, this has become a sort of competition between three billionaires, Jeff Bezos, who also has a rocket and spacecraft under development, of course Elon Musk who started it earlier, at least the publicity about it and now Richard Branson who's taken over another program than which he has crafted it for this specific purpose. So what does it indicate that is it for really exploring space or is this particular launch, particularly what Richard Branson and Virgin Galactica has done, is it really for space joy rides? So the joy rides are certainly important to Branson because that's what he wants to sell to the public, not to the public but to the well-heeled public because only they can afford to take a ride on this but that's the idea he's trying to sell is that this is a joy ride once in a lifetime opportunity to go to space, experience weightlessness etc. But there is a longer term vision involved also given Branson's own background with Virgin Atlantic and the Virgin Airlines that he runs, this is also being used as a lead-up to a possible passenger aircraft model which would, which replicates the hypersonic missiles and aircraft that we hear about so much. The idea being you take it up to altitude sufficiently enough to allow the aircraft to glide back to earth from a sufficient height to give it back four, max six speeds and glide back to its position. So this is a way of cheating the old Concorde problem of supersonic air travel. So this can later morph into a hypersonic aircraft which can then be used for polar launches San Francisco to Tokyo, New York to wherever kind of things to cut down travel. So that's always been a long-term civilian ambition of some people and Branson is trying to kill two birds with one stone with this. Well, of course, lots of issues about using hypersonic aircraft. Absolutely, absolutely. Subjected people to Mach 5, Mach 6 kind of. That's right, that's right. And using it for missiles which is another application we have discussed. Yeah, yeah. Well, but hypersonic passenger aircraft is a big problem. So that's the longer term thing because after all, as we've been saying, the number of people who are likely to spend $200,000 for a seat right now is offering it for $200,000 but now that the first flight has gone off as well as it has, observers are expecting this price tag to go up before it starts coming down. So the initial lot will go much higher than $200,000 and then maybe it will start coming down. This is a modern day version of the Hindenburg balloon which was seen as the luxury travel for the super rich till it blew up, of course, because of a hydrogen explosion. But these kinds of pioneering ventures will always aim for the super rich first and then wait to see whether it catches on to a broader public or not, which seems to be doubtful at this stage, unless the hypersonic plane turns out to be a reality with many more passengers than it is carrying at the moment. Well, let's hope that it doesn't go the Hindenburg route. Well, that's not a very happy memory but at the moment it does seem to be a 15-minute joyride, which is what it really was. Coming back to the second issue, of course, this is something who is the first is not very important. The Virgin has pipped the other two billionaires to the post being the first one to send a man with returned general civilian population vehicles, so to say. But the other issue that has come up is calling it space. Now, when we were in school, we understood a space mission should be something which takes people beyond Earth's gravitational pull and therefore put it in an orbit. That was the understanding which we had and which is what Gagarin, for instance, Yuri Gagarin did. Now, some orbital is what Alan Shepard did when his spacecraft went up and there it did not exceed escape velocity, which is again what we learned in school is what you need to take beyond Earth's gravitational field. So, what is the sub-orbital and space when you don't really exceed the orbital velocity or the acceleration required to counterbalance Earth's gravity and put yourself in a gravitational and orbit which is at least stable? Well, of course, these spacecraft which Branson has made, he's been upfront about it that it is essentially sub-orbital, although he does not want to keep talking about it, because as I said his selling point is I'm taking you to space, which as you just said is not really true. Where does airspace end and where does space begin? Has long been a question and as you said it is where the Earth's gravitation ends in that sense and where you escape beyond gravitation. The other way of looking at it is it is where orbital mechanics come into the picture rather than aerodynamics. Exactly. That means centrifugal force balances the gravity. Exactly. So, when your whole lift and drag business stops and where you go beyond that is where space begins. Now, technically speaking, this is called the Von Karman line after the Hungarian scientists who discovered this line and it's normally put at about 80 miles above the Earth. I'm saying miles because we've been hearing all this NASA stuff and it's all in miles for this. Also 100 kilometers is also great. Whereas with the Americans, because as you said Alan Shepard did not make it to orbit but was really a sub-orbital launch, the American and NASA practice is to declare anyone who has crossed 50 miles an astronaut and they give you astronaut wings. So, yesterday after Richard Branson landed, somebody went across and pinned astronaut wings on him to signify that he's crossed 50 miles, which as we know is not really space. But that's the altitude that Branson was aiming at because what he wants to give is that thrill of at an altitude of 50 miles plus the sky around you darkens. It becomes black. So, it gives you that sense of being in space. So, that's one. And secondly, when the rocket which has taken Virgin Galactica up, reaches its apogee and starts to dip. Actually, it starts falling because of gravity and it's that fall and the velocity at which it starts falling which gives you momentarily that feeling of weightlessness. Actually, they have not escaped gravity. There is no weightlessness but a impression of weightlessness is generated because you've reached a height and started going back and that shift of momentum gives you that feeling of weightlessness and you start because the velocity of your drop is so fast. So, you experience the dark sky. You can look at the earth below you and you'll see this blue sphere and the curvature of the earth and you will experience two to three minutes of quote unquote apparent weightlessness. So, that's the selling point of Branson's trip and what he is selling in this. And that's his goal. He's not trying anything more than that for now. Maybe he will later because one problem he's going to run up against is Jeff Bezos who's going to follow him on the 20th of this month is actually going beyond the Fawn Karman point. And in this space race of the billionaires, I think having been the first up in space is so-called in space is one thing but I think he will find it very difficult to keep competing with Bezos unless he's also able to re-engineer Virgin Galactica to reach the Fawn Karman point. Just for our viewers, Alan Shepard's the astronaut title that he was given was because Yuri Gagarin had gone up, actually gone into space by what he said was the definition. And therefore, the US needed to do something very quickly. They sent him on a suborbital mission knowing full well that it wasn't a space flight as Gagarin had done. In fact, the amount of time he spent was much less, the distance traveled was much less. It was within the United States virtually, that of the distance that he traveled, something like 350 kilometers or something Gagarin, a huge number of kilometers that he had traveled. And if we look at what Raghu was talking about in this suborbital flight, there's the other issue that weightlessness you can actually get without doing such a long flight. In fact, that's what the astronauts practice by getting on a kind of ballistic target to practice the same thing or one to two minutes of weightlessness. So, getting weightlessness is thought the issue but packaging the whole thing that you've gone up such a height, this is something others have not achieved, therefore give us half a million dollars, 200,000 dollars to get you through the same sense is I think the USP of this. So, this is at the moment very much a billionaire's club competition for offering a privilege which the millionaires can access but for not for other people. So, in a long-term sense, does it have any implication? It only matters if it also extends to the space launches. And this is what the next issue really I wanted to ask you. As you know, the RD-180 has been the workhorse of even the US launches at the Stalker's uses the RD-180 engine, which is Russian engine, which after the fall of Soviet Union, Americans started using because they were able to get it relatively cheaply. With the geostrategic tensions now building up between the United States and Russia again, do you see for instance the SpaceX kind of the venture and maybe Branson as well as Basil's kind of venture also competing for the rocket engines replacing RD-180 in the US future space programs? See, as far as heavy launch vehicles are concerned, that is a game which Elon Musk is playing. And frankly, neither Jeff Bezos nor Branson are really into that work. Their work has been more designed to the aircraft and to an engine which can carry their aircraft slash spacecraft in Branson's case to sub-orbital heights and to Jeff Bezos a little beyond that to get into past the Von Karman point. Elon Musk's rocket tree is more his focus than in the spacecraft at the moment. So he is more into the booster rockets. His current Atlas heavy, not Atlas heavy is what it's called, his big rocket which takes his booster up, reusable and then comes landing back. That is now actually more powerful than the Atlas series of rockets. So he is aiming at a slightly different market. He is aiming at the launch market. He is aiming finally at a rocket system which would take a rocket to the moon and use the moon as a base to then launch rockets from moon to Mars or wherever. So I would actually differentiate the Elon Musk game plan from the Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson game plans. I think the focus of Elon Musk is more in the rockets and the rocket tree and the launch vehicle market. Whereas these two are aiming at the billionaire's tourism space tourism market. Although Elon Musk is also playing at that and is likely to come out with his version also fairly soon. He was himself present, by the yesterday at Branson's launch and wished Richard Branson godspeed in his venture. So we'll see how that turns out. But in terms of launch vehicles, I think he's way ahead of the other two. Of course we'll discuss another day the respective engine issues and the fact that we discovered the Russian advances in engine which had outstripped the Americans considerably and that's why the Americans switched to the RD-182 for their Atlas rockets. That is for another day and how that shapes up for the future. But nevertheless it's interesting that the three billionaires are now jostling each other for a space tourism market but also hope maybe for the space larger space market whether the three billionaires will have at least imagine themselves to migrate out of this troubled earth and set up something elsewhere. It's something we have to see because I think they seem to envisage a time when the billionaires should leave the earth the way they are going. Now coming back to Elon Musk wishing Branson godspeed, as you know the three billionaires have been snatching at each other about their programs quite a bit and maybe Elon Musk really wished him godspeed for some other meaning to him. Yeah so I agree with you. Let's not forget also that the other ambition here is to look at the hypersonic air travel market which is the subtext in all this which Richard Branson hides under his general boyish enthusiasm. There is a hard commercial angle to this as well and he's looking at the hypersonic vehicle as a viable passenger aircraft in the future. So that's another aspect which we should keep an eye on down the road and I think that would be true of Jeff Bezos's venture as well. As far as the space launch vehicle market is concerned there's no doubt that Elon Musk has the edge there partly because the other two are not really competing for that at the moment Elon Musk is quite far ahead and because NASA has decided not to get into it which by the way may not last for very long there are already signs NASA is beginning to snipe and make sarcastic remarks about Elon Musk's rockets. NASA is beginning to conduct tests of its own on rocketry. We may see the return of NASA to this space and that's another angle which I would like to await the future to tell us what that's going to be. Yeah and of course as we know that when you talk about rocketry it has many implications. So therefore how to compete with the Russians in the future both from the hypersonic design market for future launches and with China also exactly I was just going to add there's a third horse in the race now which is likely to pull ahead certainly of Russia in the short to medium term and God knows what's going to happen in the longer run with the Americans. Actually China has also used the Russian technology extensively for their programs though they have also advanced it in certain ways but as for the rocket is concerned the students seem to be using a lot of the Russian. Yeah because China has done very well with its rocket launch and its Mars mission has gone far better than people had earlier thought that they would be able to do and that's largely because of the launch vehicle that they were. But the launch again we can discuss it another day this seemed to have borrowed quite significantly from the Russian. Yeah of course. Of course. But the point is that we are going to see a competition it seems now again in space and hopefully it will be not just for designs and not just for war but for purposes which have at least a meaning for all of us here. Thank you very much Raghu for being with us. Thank you. I think relatively complex issues which you are now forced to deal with as a part of our everyday life from COVID-19 to hypersonic vehicles as well as hypersonic designs. This is all that we have for NewsClick today. Do keep watching NewsClick and do visit our website.