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Former NASA astronaut and ISS commander Leroy Chiao joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the new space race as Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson prepare to go to space.
Video transcript
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ADAM SHAPIRO: So the world will watch on Sunday when Sir Richard Branson plans to launch and several others aboard one of his Virgin Galactic space planes in sub-orbit. I believe the actual suborbital part of the flight is 20 seconds. But it’s still really cool, isn’t it?
But our next guest is someone who can say been there, done that, three space shuttle missions, spent several months aboard the International Space Station. But to help us understand what’s going on in this new space race, we’re inviting Leroy Chiao into the stream. He is a former NASA astronaut and ISS commander. It’s good to have you here, sir.
And first of all, it’s historic, the fact that space tourism is now here. What do you take away from what must happen on Sunday?
LEROY CHIAO: Well, that’s a big deal because the promise of suborbital flight was supposed to come a lot sooner. And of course, we saw several people paying a lot more money to go to orbit for about a week. But that’s a big deal because Richard Branson and, days later, Jeff Bezos plan to pick up their spaceship, get on their spaceship, and get into suborbital flight.
This means it will touch space. These spacecraft will hit space. They will not go into Earth orbit. But they will only touch space for a few minutes, then descend and return to Earth. And so it is the announcement of a new era of commercial space. So excited to see this happen.
ADAM SHAPIRO: I have to ask you– I’m gonna have a blast here because you passed the sub-orbit. You were on the International Space Station for several months, all three shuttle missions. What does it look like? And is there a difference between when you are in orbit and in sub-orbit, the experience of a passenger?
LEROY CHIAO: Ah, absolutely. If you’re suborbital, I mean, you’ll only be weightless for maybe a few minutes. So basically you’re in a parabolic arc. You will fly away. You are going to come and be weightless, see the curvature of the Earth, see the beauty of the Earth, and look into the universe. And then you will go back down into the atmosphere.
The difference, of course, if you go into orbit you’re going to travel 17,500 miles per hour to orbit the Earth. On the other hand, those suborbital flights will probably hit around Mach 3 or so, so somewhere around 2,000 miles an hour instead of hitting the 17,500 you need to maintain orbit.
Once in orbit aboard the International Space Station, my longest mission was six and a half months, a very different experience of a few minutes.
ADAM SHAPIRO: You touched on something a little macabre, but I’m dying to ask. Is there a chance, whether it’s the Virgin Galactic space plane or the Blue Origin capsule, that they’ll go too far and, oops, we’ve burst, we’re in orbit, now we can’t come back?
LEROY CHIAO: Well, they wouldn’t go into orbit because you have to get that orbital speed of 17,500 miles per hour. These spacecraft are not designed for that. They don’t have the fuel to do it. So there is no way they could accidentally enter orbit.
Of course, there are plenty of other things that could go wrong. But these two spacecraft have undergone numerous test flights. And so it shows a lot that the founders, these two individuals, are indeed going to go flying on these spacecraft. This should give people the confidence that the testing program was very rigorous.
ADAM SHAPIRO: I don’t remember the year. But that was at least 10 years ago, maybe more. I had the privilege of covering the last shuttle launch because President Obama had put in place, I guess, the time to privatize the space program. We hear that the Chinese are making great strides. They have something that landed on the moon. They have something that landed on Mars. Yet they are so 20th century. It’s a government program, where we now have a private sector. You watch SpaceX go to the ISS.
Is that cat out of the bag, here you are and I might one day buy a ticket to go to sub-orbit and then, hopefully someday, to orbit?
LEROY CHIAO: Sure. It’s going to take a breakthrough in technology to really bring down the price of a very reliable and robust propulsion system, because rocket engines are expensive. And that’s really the driving force, these rockets, these spaceships. It takes a lot of them to be very reliable, a lot of moving parts. And that’s why you see the price drop from about $ 70 million for a weeklong orbital flight with the Russians on the ISS to about $ 250,000 for a few minutes’ flight into space at aboard Virgin Galactic or Jeff Bezos’ New Shepherd. spatialship.
But it’s still out of reach for most people, right? Do you prefer to buy a house, or do you prefer to live this experience of several minutes in space? Most people don’t have that kind of disposable income. So we’re not there yet, but we’re headed in the right direction.
ADAM SHAPIRO: And what’s the coolest thing? I mean, forgive me for getting upset again. What’s the coolest thing for you? Because like I said in the introduction, been there, done this for you. You’ve done it more than … you’ve done it three or four times in orbit.
LEROY CHIAO: Well, it’s true. I have been in low earth orbit for a cumulative total of about 230 days. My longest flight was six and a half months as commander of the International Space Station. So frankly, I’m not interested in a suborbital flight. It is a few minutes of something that I have already experienced almost a year.
So for me the big problem would be to have a chance to go to the moon or go to Mars. But it’s very exciting that the business side is starting to explode. We’re going to get more people into space, not the regular people, in quotes, who can afford that kind of ticket price, even though it’s much lower than an orbital flight. But it’s exciting to see the start.
ADAM SHAPIRO: We all have a quarter of a million dollars lying around and we are giving the Russians to take us over. Hey, real quick, do you think we’re gonna get to Mars in our lifetime?
LEROY CHIAO: You know what? I think we will. And it’s not necessarily, I hate to say it, because of a NASA program. I like to say that we have been 20 years from Mars since 1969. When we landed Apollo 11 on the Moon, everyone was sure that 20 years from now we would be on Mars, and of course we are not there. not even come back. the moon.
But SpaceX, Elon Musk has stated publicly time and time again, he launched SpaceX because he wants to colonize Mars. He himself wants to live on Mars. They’re building prototypes, the spaceship now. And they test them. And you know what? They will get there.
ADAM SHAPIRO: I have to tell you that the time it takes to get from Earth to Mars is probably about the same time it takes to walk down 2nd Avenue and then cross one of the bridges to Brooklyn in New York. Great to have you here. Thank you very much for joining us.
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