The great quality of the Indian mind, its subtlety, has been demonstrated in the recent Chandrayan-3 probe to the Moon.
"What matters is the journey, not the destination." This adage is amply valid for the Chandrayan.
How did they go? With much, much smaller rockets!
Rockets to the Moon, both from US and Russia, are much bigger and far more expensive, and spend a lot more on fuel.
How is it that the same sort of payload has been sent up to the Moon with a lot less energy?
To understand this, we need to go through the new physics, below, where the notion of "internal force" is applied.
In the case of the Chandrayan, the internal force for the Chandaryan-Earth system is gravity.
Gravity has been used as the internal force to create the extra energy which would have been spent as fuel.
How exactly did this work? First let us see how conventional rockets to the Moon work. They go from low orbit straight to the Moon, accelerating against the Earth's gravity till they reach the escape velocity. As much fuel as required for that, i consumed. One advantage here is that it is fast work. Disadvantage is large fuel tanks, large fuel requirements, heavier rockets, more pollution, etc.
How did Chandrayan work? They did use up the fuel required to reach low earth orbit, but they had a long way to go after that!
Instead of forcing the rocket up away from the Earth's gravity, they used it to reach higher speeds. So the direction of the thrust was not towards the Earth as it is for conventional rockets. In its orbit, as it was approaching the Earth, the thrust was applied in the direction of the gravity, or away from the Earth. This increased the velocity of the Chandrayan in its orbit. To repeat, the thrust was with the pull of gravity, not against it.
Now this made the Chandrayan move fast in the opposite direction! Surely this is madness!
Not quite, the escape velocity had not been reached, so the Earth's gravity pulled it back.
The orbit now is more elliptical.
As it approched the Earth, the rockets could fire again to make it move faster with the Earth's gravitational pull.
This process was repeated, till the orbit became very elliptical, such that at the farthest, very far away from Earth, the Earth's gravitational pull upon the craft became weak and the Moon's pull became significant.
Then the rockets fired towards the Moon, and a lot less energy was used to get out of the Earth's orbit, and towards the Moon. As opposed to the conventional methods. How different! Fire rockets when facing Earth, not the other way around! Such is the basic insight.
Brilliant! They can use more payload with the same fuel, with this strategy.. Go to Mars!
At the bottom is the physics issue, of internal force, and velocity addition. Every time the rocket fired, it added on the velocity by using less fuel as compared to the rockets from other countries.
So the same potential and kinetic energy was attained with much less energy..
How is that possible? How is the extra energy created?
t starts with the fact that a body can be moved with internal force. That is, within a given geometry there is a system which is independent of other masses or energies. A rocket is a good illustration - the thrust comes from the escaping gas. But the gas escapes the body - in a universe where there is nothing else but the rocket, its centre of gravity stays exactly where it was. Ditto for any gun firing a bullet. Stop the bullet in the barrel, there will be an explosion, but the gun will go nowhere. The centre of gravity stays put. Such is inertia.
Let us assume we have a "rocket" which gets thrust but does not eject mass. In other words, it goes by pure internal force. Obviously, that cannot be! The laws of motion will be violated. For every action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction. Just cannot happen. But for the sake of argument, let us say it does and see to what it leads to.
Some energy E stored within the "rocket" will be expended to move it from inertia and in the absence of any friction or other forces, it will continue to move in a straight line after accelerating over the period over which the internal force acts.
It will have a velocity say v.
Its kinetic energy with respect to the base reference state will be 0.5mv^2.. It will be less than the energy E, for there will be losses involved.
Let us now introduce a efficiency k factor. k is greater than 1.
Thus E = 0.5mV^2k
Let the above processes be repeated N times. So with respect to the earliest frame of reference, the velocity of the "rocket" will be Nv. The energy expended will be NE.
The kinetic energy of the "rocket" with respect to the base reference state will be 0.5m(Nv)^2 where m is the mass of the "rocket".
When N is large compared to k, the term -
(0.5m(Nv)^2 - NE) will be positive, indicating that extra energy has been created. Let us call it e.
Then
e = 0.5m(Nv)^2 - NE
or e = 0.5mNNv^2 - 0.5mNkv^2
or e = 0.5mNv^2(N-k)
This was derived in my book "To the Stars" published online in my (now defunct) adda website in January 2000. It is an alternative to e=mc^2 and all its implications.
Energy is perpetually being created, and then destroyed in our infinite universe. When this idea catches on, many problems on Earth will be solved, with no end of opportunities.

***
Point is that using gravity as a useful force the Indian engineers put up a payload to the Moon using less energy as compared to conventional methods. I have explained how that was done. One could say that the Chandrayan must be a hoax as it disproved the law of conservation of energy! And how dare Indians do that!! Just as they say that my rail gun experiments are a sleight of hand, some trick. I am just glad that things are changing a little. Indians are not being that dependent and totally in awe of the West, they are being original. Great! Now if they had given me that much money I could have made a new class of motor to the Moon which would work on anti gravity, using my new physics which has been applied here with stunning success in this new launch technology. It would be far faster, cheaper, safer and even put fresh water to the destination. Details are there in my youtube videos.. Another 7 years before my motor takes off, I hope.

***
The new physics relates to getting the same potential energy with less chemical energy. It is not something the peers will accept so it cannot get published save online. Just as I invented blogging back in 1992 or so as.no one would print my literary articles so I am using online meaning Usenet, YouTube and Facebook to publish my new research. Always a pioneer, I.

Cheers,
Arindam Banerjee