Slashdot Mirror
India To Become Aerospace Powerhouse?
jaydub99 writes: "It looks like India will continue to explore new markets for their low-cost, high-tech people. Their next arena could be deploying satellites in high-earth (geostationary) orbit. I wonder how much of the resistance from the U.S. is military-based and how much is economically motivated?"
Its's not that there are no building standards. Infact BIS(Beauru of India Standards) has pretty good standards. But, the problem is one of corruption due to which they are not enforced.
Same goes for the power. It's the rampant stealing of the power which is causing problems.
As, for doing things which are 20-30 years old. The reason is that because of geographical advantage(launch sites near the equator) and cheap research and labour cost they can do it at 1/2 the cost if not lower. They have to launch lots of communication setallites(Important for infrastructure) and remote sensing satellites(important for agriculture). So, you see in the end they save money and not spend it.
Besides, this creates ancillary industries which creatres jobs and saves precious foriegn exchange. So, the money spent on these launches benefits Indian economy instead of some developed country.
So, the short answer is that it actually costs less in the long term for India to develop these capabilities then to pay high prices for them to some other country.
By the way the lower costs is the primary reason that US opposes Indian developing such capability not military applications which are a different ball game. After all US needs to protect it's launching market. Thuough IMHO India will not have enough capacity to take away more then a small but significant share of the launch market. It takes some time to develop that king of manufacturing capacity(note-- not capability)