 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today on our science discussions, we have D. Raghunandan and we are going to discuss what we had discussed in NewsClick last week that how do we look at the space flights which are taking place. We had earlier the Virgin space space flight that took place. Now, we have also the space flight of Jeff Bezos and he seems to have done again another suborbital flight. We discussed the difference between suborbital and a really a proper orbiting spacecraft. But it did cross what is called the von Karman line which is supposed to be the point where space really starts. Raghun, again the question is what does it signify in terms of the rockets, the engine. We had discussed this last time also with respect to the Virgin space program and we had said it seems to be relatively less powerful and less versatile than what we are talking about as space flight. This is also not what for instance Tesla has been doing, more powerful engines. But it seems to be a little more ambitious than the Virgin Galactic space flight. Well, yes and no in the sense that the Virgin Galactic rocket idea and the design of the space plane as a reusable craft which is lands like an aircraft like the space shuttle was and is able to maneuver through the once it has re-entered the atmosphere it's able to maneuver and glide aerodynamically till it makes its landing. Now that gives Virgin one advantage in what it is looking at possibly which is that tomorrow if it has a larger vehicle with more passengers then it can translate this idea into a hypersonic aircraft which then using traveling at speeds higher than sound would be able to ferry passengers from A to B wherever across the oceans and so on. So and since Virgin is a largely aircraft company I think they would have an interest in that design. Now as far as the Blue Origin is concerned that is really not their target market. They are looking at this purely as a space venture whereas I think Virgin Galactic can be looking at a hybrid model between space and aircraft. The Blue Origin is purely a space venture. If they are aiming at space tourism as they say then at best they can have a slightly larger crew module where they can have a few more passengers and give them a joy ride into space and back but at this power of their rocket engines and a sub orbital flight they will not even be able to go to the space station for example. All that they can do is to put a few satellites into very low earth orbit which any number of other launchers are doing today so it doesn't give them any great advantage there. So their only market now that I can see is a limited and rather restricted one of space tourism and frankly speaking having watched both the launches live of course they are the usual howls and shrieks of delight coming from the capsule but an 11 minute trip which includes a few minutes of weightlessness for any number of hundreds of thousands of dollars to my mind doesn't really is not really a great hot sell and Virgin Galactic despite the fact that it's the same time period in space that they experience they give you at least an hour and a half ride which is like the difference between the Hindi film and a Hollywood film. The Hindi film at least gives you three hours inside an air conditioned cinema with popcorn thrown in whereas a Hollywood movie will give you 90 minutes at best and India being a price-conscious country and many other passengers will perhaps find a 11 minute thriller they feel a bit short changed I think. Well Lagu you've also talked earlier about the possibility of a hypersonic passenger aircraft to be at current economics of it it doesn't look unless something radically changes doesn't look that easy also and secondly you have also land-based systems like Magale which you can discuss another day developing which seems to show that there's a whole range of transports of options available and if we look at all of that maybe hypersonic is still something which economically will have to justify itself in a very different way but looking at the current technologies they are supposed to be playing for a market which is essentially what NASA was originally the sole monopoly from which it is withdrawing and of course we have the Tesla coming in but if you look at all the rocket engines and this is where really the United States was well behind the Soviet Union which is something that people were not aware of till the 1990s when we found that you know Russians were selling then the RD engine to the United States and they switched almost entirely to the Russian engines for the space flight also what we talked about the International Space Station was serviced then by the Soyuz spacecraft so looking at the engines do you think with now putting Tesla also into play because Tesla has been servicing the space shuttle market and it has been doing first sending other stuff basically not human beings and now also taking over ferrying people astronauts into the space station do you think that these three players are in some sense the future inheritors of of what NASA was doing and they will gradually become private players in space at least for the Americans yeah I think at least at present between the three I think Elon Musk with his SpaceX range of rockets is ahead of the other two in that regard he's got a more powerful rocket he's seriously into the launch markets whereas neither Virgin Galactic nor Blue Origin offer any great services in terms of launches given the low altitudes to which they are able to reach which will hardly sustain satellites for Earth observation or any of those purposes but I think the SpaceX range is actually seriously vying for a large part of the NASA subcontracted space market that is where I think at least Elon Musk is pushing for he's already now ferrying crew to crew and cargo to the space station he is also planning to launch his own space station sometime in the future so he'll have a private space station there which will then offer services for scientists for astronauts from the US from other countries to go spend time in the space station do scientific experiments etc as well as space tourists to go and spend longer time in the space station as we spoke about last time when the first space tourist went aboard the Soyuz aircraft to the space station way back in 2001 he spent seven days there so the Virgin Galactic quick trip to space is not really a first in that sense it's been done before so Elon Musk can offer that longer stints at this space station and if his plans work out the way he wants he would be able to or he's aiming to develop a rocket close to the performance at least of the Atlas range which is based on the Russian RD 120 rocket engines that you spoke of he would at least be able to his current range of rockets is aiming at roughly twice the power of the Atlas V series not yet reaching the kind of power that the Saturn V had all of this of course Raghu is at the moment subsidized entirely by NASA because all the current projects he has had he has some development expenditure he's incurred but most of the really money is coming from public funding which is really the NASA funding so all of this could also be hyped as a marketing hype to see that NASA doesn't invest in its own programs but subcontracts all of this to Elon Musk and Tesla so how much is hype and how much is not something we need to see in the future but looking at the engines per se comparing it to the Russian advance as you know the Russian engines we were talking about for Atlas range by really relatively older engines they have gone considerably beyond that but if you look at the engines how do they compare to the current generation of Russian engines? Well the Russians haven't unfortunately for them they had a very large advantage over any American why do you call it unfortunate? No I'm saying they had this lead then but unfortunately they have not built on that because they stopped working on their engines after the Soviet collapse they've not been able to invest the kind of money they wanted on their rocket program so while they earlier had this very big advantage over the Americans unless they now invest a lot of money to rebuild their rocket program to build new more powerful rockets which reports are that they are trying with Chinese investment if required because as you know the Chinese rocket program has largely been built again on building on the Russian rockets of that generation which NASA didn't do when the Americans took the Russian RD-180 they hardly worked on that to take it further and develop it it just stayed where it was so now it is up to players like Musk and there are a couple of others who are also trying it the Blue Origin efforts I think are quite far behind but there are a few other players in the rocket engine but can we look at the Russian and the Chinese a little more? Yeah so as far as I can see the Russians today and the Chinese both have rocket engines which are very powerful go beyond the Atlas range capability in terms of lift capability currently the Falcon heavy of Elon Musk is roughly about twice the amount the power generated of any comparable rocket flying but that's not the only parameter that we have to go by it's also a question of what speeds you're able to reach and whether you are able to make a shot to the moon directly which of course now the Chinese have shown through their soft landing on the moon their efforts at Mars they are not behind on that either and both the Russians and the Chinese the Chinese in particular are aided by the fact that they have developed and built on these technologies for their ICBMs which of course are much longer range there and therefore they are at par in terms of the distances they can reach now what remains to be seen is how much payload can they carry to those distances and that's where I think if at all Elon Musk is going to compete he'll have more competitors in Russia and China than he will inside the United States at present have you seen the just recently what was launched by Russia the NAUKA space station module which seems to be the heaviest module that has been transported it's weighs about nine tons so given that do you think that indicates the proton M rocket is what it is do you think that is a something which you also should be observing what what is the yes yes the proton nine is an advance if I'm not mistaken the proton nine I think has a how much was it it's about what 705 tons of thrust Elon Musk space Falcon Heavy is able to match that in terms of thrust and the payload delivery up to low earth orbit is matched by SpaceX so that part of it I think is not a big challenge in terms of reach that's able to do Elon Musk's challenge I think is his next step which is to go beyond that where his engines are currently experimental in his so-called spaceship venture which have so far been tested only up to one-third of the orbital altitude which he is aiming at so unless he actually succeeds at an orbital altitude we don't know how he stands in terms of the development of that technology so broadly speaking as of now Bezos and Branson seem to be a rich boys club trying to play with very very expensive toys but as far as Elon Musk is concerned Tesla is concerned you think that Falcon range and the kind of things he's planning to do has at least more potential and could be players in the future yeah except that now interestingly watching all this happen NASA has been getting a little jealous and has also decided to re-enter the game and is beginning to invest once more into its own program launch services with other launch partners in which the leader is the old legacy launch partner the United Launch Agency in which Boeing is a part and they are trying to revive that NASA is also developing its own engine which is not RD-180 based so we'll have to see how that goes because after all NASA has got deeper pockets than Elon Musk given state support so we need to see how that goes but at least between the billionaires in the billionaires race that we've been talking about it seems to me that Elon Musk is far ahead his biggest challenge there is one the technology of the larger rockets which he's aiming at for the spaceflight program and where does he get the money from? It's very clear where he gets the money from at the moment from NASA so NASA's deep white pockets are also going to help Elon Musk but as we have said earlier giving up a technology dismantling your own infrastructure building it back is not that easy not in case they had the ICBM at least that technology has shown also that they have not fallen behind on missile technologies so given that and what you said about the Chinese Chinese have deep pockets too so given all of that we have interesting possibilities in the space era opening up of course I would say I don't know about Raghu and I'm going to conclude this session by saying that as of now space is still for scientific exploration it has not reached any commercial stage so the commercial possibilities are only for again the rich boys play toys but it is not for any serious purpose the serious purpose would still be scientific exploration communication if you will and this is basically the reserve of the nation states still and of course the big nation states who have as Raghu said deep pocket thank you very much Raghu for being with us explaining all the technical issues involved I'm sure that our listeners will not really our viewers really will not you know be following the details of a lot of the things you've said some of it is also gone past what you explained to me but hopefully this will interest all of us to go back look at all of these issues with new eyes thank you very much this is all the time we have for news click today do keep watching news click and also visit our website