I would have thought that full automation is a demonstration that the exact opposite is true?

Well, you'll have to scribble them again. ;-)

Nah, Jarnik all the way! ;-) But if this is what you want, you can fetch it right now.

Are you talking about this book? Apparently, if you want badly, you can print it yourself.

Pity that people can't self-publish these days...

Oh, wait!

And apparently, you survived!

All you're saying is true, but I think we've had enough problems with space-based moving parts (the assorted reaction wheels, Voyager 1 and 2 scan platforms etc.) compared to non-moving parts that finding a reasonable solution to this problem seems like something that everyone could benefit from. If a number of long-distance scientific missions have all the components working with the exception of moving parts, it would appear that moving parts with long lifetimes are the next major problem to solve. Voyagers had problems early on. That made the scientific output from Voyager 2 diminished even before it got to Uranus and Neptune. It's not just about extended missions in some cases.

That doesn't mean that people aren't trying, though.

For these missions, though, it's generally desirable for the vehicle to last as much as you can make it. Surely the average scientific return per day from Opportunity is much, much cheaper now that it's been operating for ten years than it would have been had it only worked for the originally planned ninety days.

And the upper stages will have anywhere from one to six (!) RL-10s. Those apparently ain't cheap either.

They won't get out of poverty unless India becomes a developed country, and India won't become a developed country unless they venture into new branches of industry. Plus, ISRO isn't NASA, they're recovering costs by doing commercial launches.

You can't conjure the "kinetic energy of a small nuke" out of thin air - the launch vehicle has to provide it. Even with this rocket, you won't get more than ~40 tons of TNT equivalent per launch. That's a tiny nuke. And that's before accounting for atmospheric losses. And forget ground blasts (or low altitude airbursts), not gonna happen with such small masses. Not to mention how awfully impractical such a weapon would be from an operational perspective (target choice, attack timing etc.)

I did, because it's an accurate description of Vikas. The US equivalent of Indians adopting Vikas would be the US flying to the Moon with the V-2 engine - which obviously didn't happen. The Indian equivalent of replicating the US post-war engine development would be Indians letting French guys immigrate and develop a much improved new engine on Indian salary - which didn't happen either. That's why I considered the topic digression to post-war US completely inconsequential. Their new CE-20 engine is fully domestic, though - although that's exactly the one that hasn't flown yet. Which is unfortunate, because it seems really nice, I'll give them that. If it's cheap enough, it could become a real workhorse for ISRO.

Wernher von Braun isn't a name of a component of a German rocket. Viking IS a name of a component of a French rocket, though.

Very much incomparable. There was a lot of knowledge transfer from the German engineers, but mostly in the theoretical area, whereas Vikas is a case of virtually identical flight hardware. That wasn't the case in the US beyond some initial experiments with V-2s; all the US hardware had to be developed from the first principles. For example, the German regenerative cooling on V-2 sucked, so it couldn't be used, and even after that problem was solved, nobody in the world - not even Germans - really knew how to build really large engines, so US engineering had to step into an unmapped territory with the F-1. And essentially identical knowledge to what was transferred back then after the war plus a lot of new knowledge is now pretty much textbook material (and has been for a few decades) that you can buy from Amazon - where do you think Elon Musk learned it?

And again, what has that to do with me explaining why the core stage uses toxic fuels? How are Americans or Germans related to the problem of how GLSV Mk III ended up using those fuels?