India and NASA to Explore Moon Together

hotsauce writes "NASA administrator Griffin on a visit to Indian space facilities in Bangalore has signed an agreement to explore the moon with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This agreement will see NASA instruments on a 2008 Indian moon mission, and further cooperation is being explored. An Indian paper has a different take on the visit. Interesting answer by Griffin on NASA outsourcing to ISRO."

For Mankind.

[ZSpade]

Since progress in this field is really beneficial to all of humanity, it's really good to see more countries joining forces to move progress along. I think in the long run privitization of the space industry is the way to go, but until that industry takes off a world wide coalition to push things forward might be our best bet for progress.

It has little to do with altruism.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that "benefitting all humanity" has anything to do with this partnership. It's about the economics of it.

First of all, we must remember that Indian engineers are just as capable as engineers from any other part of the world. While we have all had horrible experiences talking with tech support representatives over there, that is in no way indicative of their engineering talent. India especially has become one of the world leaders in aerospace research.

Second of all, at this time, an American dollar goes a very long way in India. As with outsourcing in the IT field, it is often cheaper for American companies to buy the services of Indian engineers, rather than hire domestic workers.

Third, we must also remember that America has lost much of its heavy manufacturing to nations like India and China in the past two decades. Indian firms may be better equipped to actually manufacture the rocketry and componentry needed for missions to the moon.

I doubt that trying to benefit humanity has any significant role in this decision. It seems more like a prudent financial move, in that it may significantly reduce costs.

Outsourcing/offshoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that we've outsourced (offshored) offworlding to India... The country with the least space experience that still can launch sats... we could buy off-the-shelf Mars systems Made-in-China or somesort instead of doing a stupid space-exploration thingy... Afterall, isn't that what made WalMart great?

Re:This Assumes That We're All Still Here...

[Locke2005]

What part of "minimum miss distance" do you not quite understand?

The target is China, not the moon

[miletus]

This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.

Re:Japan vs. India

[Liveandletlive]

Because Japan was never ruled by greedy idiots (British and Muslims). Because India was dumb enough not to invest in its own military and modernization.

Those who give stupid comparisions need to understand that there still are homeless and starving population in US of A and that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Already Been There

[hotsauce]

Of course, to them [NASA] it probably is a joke, since they've already been there.

A surprising number of people are expressing this sentiment. NASA "has already been there" with much older equipment, most of which was simply geared to keep humans alive. This mission gives the opportunity to do real science with modern equipment, and answer new questions, for instance Smart 1's survey of surface elements to confirm theories about the origin of the moon.

Re:Japan vs. India

[Anonymous Coward]

The Japanese were way ahead of Indians in many respects. Singular language and religion for the most part, with general homogeneity. The Indians have a fragmented culture - hundred of subdialects, subsects of religion that are well nigh incompatible with one another. Indians and Africans are very interesting to me, because most people see them from the outside as one monolithic culture, but they are an amalgam of dozens, hundreds of cultures. They get along imperfectly because they are different. This is mis-perceived by outsiders. India and Africa also share the same problems associated with Imperialism - and how it negatively affected their populace. Africa, moreso, obviously. The Japanese, by and large, are one people.

NATIONALISM: Getting their asses kicked in WWII was a GREAT motivator. No offense to any Japanese members of our community. India has no such unifying struggle.

Also, even back then, the Japanese were working towards a urban environment. Cities all over. Things go way faster the denser the population is in an urban center with access to education and opportunity. India is not as such.

Indians also has entrenched cultural mores that make their society resistant to change. Not so Japanese. They are a remarkably adaptable people.

SCALE: India is a billion people+. There is no dictatorship/regime to issue authoritarian demands. JApan is a much smaller country. Scale counts. Bigger things move slower. Exceptions are dictatorships - etc, where there are singular visions and people are forced to adhere.

Economic Policies

[hotsauce]

Poor economic policies. It's easy to call them poor in hindsight, but many countries thought them a good idea at the time (witness the Soviets, with otherwise very impressive achievements). Also, these policies were born out of fear--India had been colonized by a company [wikipedia.org], and was very concerned about foreign trade and private companies.

Since the 1990s, India has changed economic course, with good results [wikipedia.org]. The Indian government still believes that satelite communications forms an important part of basic infrastructure in a country that large, and studies have shown that it is cheaper for India to run its own space program than pay others to build and maintain satelites and infrastructure.

India spends $700 million a year on its space program. So the choice is: give each citizen less than a dollar a year, or build a modern communications and research infrastructure that enables enterprise and creates jobs. No country ever got rich off handouts.

Re:Conversation from the mission...

[geobeck]

Racist?! For a simulated accent imitation? Would I be a racist if I imitated a Newfie accent? Or a Southern accent? How about Cockney or Scots?

I read a tech support horror story from the customer's point of view once where the support tech had such a heavy accent that the customer could not understand what he was saying. The customer asked to speak to someone else. The supervisor called him a racist and hung up on him, even though he had made no other comment than "I cannot understand what this technician is saying."

You, sir, are a knee-jerk reactionary. People talk differently. People think differently. Misunderstandings between people with different dialects, and different thought patterns, are funny. They have been since Much Ado About Nothing, and most likely long before that.

Do you complain about every comedian who makes a culture-oriented joke? Must keep you busy, because that's pretty much all of them.

Re:Japan vs. India

[SoumyaRay]

wow. how can such a (presumably) well educated crowd as slashdot remain so fricking ignorant about the world? whats with all these racist jokes? sometimes when i read slashdot's blatant racism, methinks that india is doing the world a huge favor by taking away valuable jobs from the hands of such ignorance.

first, you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india, despite having wrecked the indian economic potential far more surely than the americans did the japanese. you forget that india suffered 200 yrs of brutal colonial rule that left all but a tiny fragment of its ppl uneducated. you forget that under colonialism, indians weren't even allowed to run anything that resembled industry... it was illegal to do more than grow basic commodity crops for british consumption. when india got indepedence, it had an industrial revolution to catch up on. japan did not have to go through that -- they had industrial know-how all along.

the indian space research organization is single-mindedly dedicated to the development of technology that benefits civilians. you can read about that yourself. the moon-mission is the first gamble they are taking wherein they hope that a challenging outer-space mission will both boost their technological know-how and in turn help civilians in the future, and also ignite the minds of indian children regarding technology and space. yes, i understand that americans who were born before the 90s can't see anything outside the cold-war prism. but really, indians just want to push their technology further...

why did japan not invest into military and nuclear technology the way india has? simply b/c it has always been under the american military and nuclear umbrella. india, on the other had, was treated as a pariah by the US for not kowtowing to american foriegn policy. india has had to suffer embargos and sanctions for its right to defend itself. in contrast the obstentatiously peace-loving japanese could pretend that it didn't want to develop a strong military or militaristic technology, when in reality it has just counted on the US to protect it.

ok, enough. i'm not getting paid to educate this lot. nor is it entirely feasible.

Re:Japan vs. India

[fm6]

When Japan was a 3rd-world nation, its government spent almost no money on space development. Rather, Tokyo plowed money into developing industry so that Japan could reach 1st-world status as quickly as possible.

You're as ignorant as you are anonymous. When was Japan a "third world nation"? That refers to a country with no industrial infrastructure. Japan hasn't been in that category since 1868, when they were forced to give up isolationism and modernize. They've been an industrial nation ever since. Perhaps you're thinking of the period right after WW II, when they were recovering from the destruction of their industrial centers. But even then, they hardly resembled a "third world" nation: they were still an industrial economy, albeit a badly damaged one.

By contrast, the Indian government wastes huge sums of money on space exploration and nuclear-weapons development. Meanwhile, the majority of Indians live in squalor.

Well, I'm not going to endorse nuclear weapons in India or anywhere else. But if you think that spending money on technological developement has no impact on India's poor, you're as ignorant of economics as you are of history. In order to take better care of its people, India has to grow its economy, and to do that, they need to invest in intellectual capital. They've been very successful at that, as a lot of Americans who've seen their jobs taken over by Indians will tell you.

Re:Japan vs. India

[mrops]

"Why did Japan succeed but India fail?"
I think comparision between India and Japan is wrong. Japan was fighting the world during WWII i.e. it was a world power, India at the time was coming out of a British rule that had slaved it.

All Japan really had to do is recover from WWII and the nukes. India had to start from scratch. Its only been 55 odd years or so since British rule ended in India. 55 Years is not a lot of time for a country to get freedom and stand on its feat.

Closest I would compare here is that Japan has succeeded and India is still writing its exam, judgement is still out.

There is a reason to why everyone is worried about outsourcing to India. This is also where NASA can learn from India. Budget for ISRO is nothing compared to that of NASA, nonetheless ISRO is in a select class of organization that has managed to launch a one ton plus satellite into orbit.

This is where NASA has most to gain, getting things done for lesser costs. Further, no single event except for wars have helped technology as much as NASA's Man on the Moon mission.

ISRO's exploration of the moon has similar objectives as well.

Re:NASA is aware...

[FurryFeet]

Please re-parse that sentence. You assumed it meant that Western people are typically ignorant. A second interpretation could be that GP is displaying a specific type of ignorance, one that is typical to Western people, namely, in the area of foreign cultures. I move that he's quite right.

Re:Japan vs. India

[syslog]

>Because Japan was never ruled by greedy idiots (British and Muslims).

And you bring religion into this because??? Just proves you are a bigotted idiot.

kind regards.

Re:Stunning accomplishments by India

[William Robinson]

whoring karma from all those Indian moderators

Does it work? Ok, let me try...

Kudos to Manmohan Singh and his team, who have brought liberation and economic reforms. India is on the road of becoming superpower. Ellora and Taj Mahal are great piece of art.

Ok..I am waiting.. +5?

Re:Griffin's answer

[Rei]

First off, I agree that it's not politically viable. I'm just talking technology and economics.

We can't launch the CEV on an EELV; man-rating any of those vehicles would be a nightmare.

It'd be nothing compared to the difficulties they're having trying to get a working CEV design using SRBs. Cut the mission scope to be nothing more than ISS, cut the anticipated lifespan, and you have a much simpler engineering task.

not only is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion going to cost billions of dollars and take years to finish

True, at least in the case of a full-scale craft based on it. Hundreds of millions to the low billions for research (NERVA did most of it for us), and upper tens of millions per engine.

but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it,

Way out of the ballpark. NERVA-2 (the spacecraft) was expected to cost 266m$ per 870k kg rocket in 1985 dollars (perhaps 400m$ today).

Sheesh, that's ANOTHER $5 billion

Um, no. The entire JIMO probe was slated to cost 400m$, which included a gas-cooled nuclear reactor.

and if we're successful, we'll have the largest ever nuclear protest group at the launch site...ASSUMING that we can get launch approval!

As stated, I deliberately ignored political consideration and approached only from a technological and economic standpoint. However, that's not really true. While they're popular to pillory, the Cassini protests were pretty darn small. Nuclear thermal propulsion might get a higher political profile, but a gas-cooled electricity-generating reactor won't.

"Antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion"?!?!?! What are you smoking? If we have problems launching something like New Frontiers, which had an RTG on it, how are we going to launch the most dangerous thing known to mankind?

Okay, now you're off the deep end here. Do you know what *catalyzed* means? The amount of antimatter is miniscule. We simply cannot affordably produce (nor trap) enough antimatter with current technology to produce a pure antimatter thruster. Antimatter *catalyzed* microfission/microfusion uses energetically irrelevant amounts of antimatter to trigger fission or fusion reactions in microscopic specs of fuel.

I doubt that there's a workable science bench microfission...

Google it. I'm not here to teach you Advanced Propulsion Concepts 101.

and even if there were, it's got to fit on a conventional launch vehicle to get into space.

Penning trap + pellet injector + antimatter injector + bell nozzle + pellet tank = antimatter catalyzed microfission/microfusion rocket. Which component, may I ask, are you picturing as being huge/heavy?

I'm almost surprised that you didn't rail against HEDM, cryogenic solids/hybrids, OTRAG, or any of the other things I mentioned.