An Indian On the Moon By 2020 299
turgid writes, "The Hindustan Times reports that the Indian Space Research Organization plans to land an Indian on the Moon by 2020. First, experiments will be conducted to launch, orbit, and recover a capsule. Plans are to launch an Indian into space in 2014. Manned orbital missions will be launched, initially for a day, but eventually lasting a week or more. Expeditions to the Moon are expected to last 15 days to a month." The article doesn't estimate the cost of such a program. The US Apollo program cost about $135 billion (in 2006 dollars), according to Wikipedia.
Re:You've got two satellites... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You've got two satellites... (Score:3, Insightful)
They do have a cold war with Pakistan, though its pretty small scale compared with US vs USSR.
Re:Outsourcing space??? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:You've got two satellites... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's cheaper the second time (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of the cost of the American space program was developing technology that is now commonplace. The Indian IT team will have better equipment on day one than the US had on the day of the lunar landing, for example. India is no slouch in telecoms terms either.
Also, there was a lot of experimentation involved in the first space exploration that doesn't need to be done again. We know how to make space suits, and, thanks mainly to the Russians, we know a lot about the effects of long-term zero-gravity trips on the human body.
And even if America and Europe don't play ball (which is depressingly likely on past form), I'm sure the Russians will be willing to hand over as much technology as the Indians don't feel like reinventing.
So it won't be cheap, but I'd expect it to be cheaper in real terms than the first race to the moon.
And I'm taking as read that the Indian space program really has the same motivation as European and American space exploration, ie it's an excuse to pour lots of state funding into your high-tech industries, which gives you more competitive terrestial technology as a spin-off. In other words, this is probably more about kick-starting the Asian airliner industry than about photos of Indians eating poppadums in a crater.
Re:Let's reinvent the wheel, not help the poor. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same problem exists in many developed countries. There are just people who either don't want the help or cannot be helped. There are many people in the US who we classify as being below the poverty line that are happy and content with their lives. The problem is that we assign our standards of happiness to them and cannot contemplate how they can be in a state other than misery.
India suffers further complications because of class differences that are more important to their society than ours. They also have logistics, religious, and other issues. Sure the money could be used to try and fix these problems but money cannot buy the time needed. Only so much can be spent before your wasting it. A moonshot helps all of Inida, both directly and indirectly. It gives hope. If India can land people on the moon then people can see that yes, one day their children's lives will be better because what they see as an impossible situation really isn't. After all, landing on the moon certainly looked impossible but India will do it.
To all the people making snide remarks about feeding their people first, skip your lattes and such and donate yourself. Why ask others to do what you will not?
oh, thats right, its far easier to assign guilt than to acknowledge it
Re:You've got two satellites... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's reinvent the wheel, not help the poor. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the USA is a very rich country in which many people can't get medical treatment because they can't afford it. As my grandma used to say - sort your own house out before criticising others. According to your logic, the USA should divert funding from NASA to national health programmes.
I've travelled in India and I find the homeless on the street in many big cities in the USA more of a disgrace than those in India. The USA is rich.
Re:Let's reinvent the wheel, not help the poor. (Score:0, Insightful)
You have to be one of the elite to say that. You will realize how content they are when they are on your doorstep with every edged weapon you can imagine, and maybe even guns, to take what they should have had access to all along. And, the sooner the better. There's no excuse for people starving in the 21st century in a country whose government is planning a moon shot.
Airliners are linked to other activities (Score:2, Insightful)
It should also be noted that South Korea and Japan in economic terms are quite small compared to United States or European Union, they just don't have muscle enough to set up a support systems to make building airliners economically feasible. Also it should be noted that both South Korea and Japan are allied with US, so it would be politically risky to start building a competitive industry to a industry that US sees as a strategic as. Airline, space and armaments industries are heavily strategic industries in the eyes of world powers. In that perspective both India and China will one day build up their own airliner industries to compete with Europeans and Americans.
Re:You've got two satellites... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's reinvent the wheel, not help the poor. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you talking real measureable stats in terms of income distribution? The reason I'm asking is I'm wondering if you actually did some reading about India, or if you're one of those international travellers who land in Delhi and start shrieking "Ooooh my god, these cow-worshippers; why aren't they more like us?"
If you're of the former type, then I'd like you to be more rigorous in your assertion. My reading tells me that we've just turned the corner in terms of BPL households; I've read -and this is a freely available stat, google it up - that the largest agglomeration of poverty in human history was in 1991, and that, given the way both China and India are growing, it is unlikely that we'll ever again have 300 million people in one place, living in such abject poverty. I'm told that the
If you're of the latter type, just to say this; we love you guys. We love the way you hate us, we love the way you like being condescending on us brown folk, we love the fact that you think you're brilliant enough to dictate policy for the largest democracy this planet has ever seen.
Otoh, if you were just trying to provoke an indignant response from folks like me, ahh well, IHBT. IHL. I don't care; I'm waiting for a build to finish, I could do with some verbal sparring.
You know, I consider myself one of those pragmatic folks who's mostly beyond mere nationalistic loyalty and would like to think about policy through a purely rational perspective. The problem with responses like yours is that you tend to look at everything in black and white terms, ignoring the real shades of gray that reality encompasses. I could go at length on medical, and drug, policy (and I have, on multiple occassions here on Slashdot), but I'll just limit myself to pointing this out: in 1940's, when we got independent, life expectancy was 41 years. Now, it is 76 years (or thereabouts). For a system that's an _abject_ failure, that's some result, you'd think.
I've recently read, mostly as a part of the reading packet I alluded to earlier, that the house in which my grandparents used to live is actually located in an area officially designated as a 'slum'. Always knew the area wasn't really posh - Grandpa was a lowly village headmaster, he really couldn't afford those fancy bungalows - so to see it being designated as a 'slum' was, well, more amusing than surprising.
Funny thing eh, that I've turned to tech for a living.
And oh. You should hear what they did to Grandpa's house after we sold it. They demolished the old house, a three-room-dwelling with tiled roofs and wooden support, and built a cookie-cutter, stalin-isque office-like building. Yes that's right; they built an IT-training center in that very spot.
Yeah, did you hear that all of the national budget will be siphoned off into sending people to the Moon?
How wise of you to decide our technological challenges for us, and how gratifying that we've got you to call us stupid. So going to space is a solved problem for mankind that doesn't need more impetus or thought? An American astronaut, Kalpana Chawla would agree with you. No wait
Why not go to Mars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having your own moon program is just ambition, to show that you're there with the rest of them. Well, the Americans to be more specific. You just want to be more American than the Americans, as one in every two Bollywood movies shows...
Re:Let's reinvent the wheel, not help the poor. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Mmm, in my youth, when the US moon program was announced on the radio,
there was still a caste in the US, who had to sit on the back of the buses.
They also couldn't vote freely and yet, they had a dream.
It was not a dream about a moonshot though.
Re:Why not go to Mars? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why not go to Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
The US is facing the same issues right now. It wants to restart its space oddeysey, but unfortunately most of the technology used back then has been outdated - plus the original team that worked on these missions are either resting in their graves or enjoying retirement. I welcome this move - more players in the field bring in more competition, more innovation and a race to get things moving. Remember what happened in the 70s when the Soviet Union stopped their space voyages?
just a new spacerace (Score:2, Insightful)
India is ususally more concerned with local politics,
that is they are dealing with countries like Pakistan and China
they feel ususally threatened by China as does any other country over there, china being an expansionist power on their borders. Also they want to compete with china on equal footing. like with the nbr of people within their borders and likewise on the spacerace front..