Asia's Space Race: China vs. India

securitas writes "London-based military historian and commentator Gwynne Dyer writes about Asia's developing space race with plans from China and India to land people on the Moon, previously mentioned on Slashdot in China's case. In April India announced it will send an unmanned probe to the Moon by 2005 and a manned mission by 2015. Critics say it's a waste of time and money for India to pursue the goal. Meanwhile, Russian space experts are quietly helping China in what is seen as a growing alliance and a somewhat alarmist op-ed piece from the Washington Times worries about China's 21st century space dominance and monopolization of strategic resources like H3, used in nuclear fusion."

Comments

Indian Ventures == PR

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an Indian (note this before you start flaming or modding down) and has been following the Indian space programme and a whole lot of other programmes for quite a while, (and yes, I can claim to understand the Indian psychology more).

In India everything of this nature are 90% for PR and public consumption and 10% realistic projects.

This is a not stupid move either [although, it does end up foul, read on], unlike many Sladhdotters who think that India is stupidly wasting money on space, ocean, Antarctica and a whole lot of crap that are playthings for rich countries, while the people starve.

It is a calculated risk, more money is spent on trying to keep the economy stable, trying to provide decent health etc. (The percentage of GDP spent on defence in India is much less than that of the US.) The problem is that the corruption in this area is a whole lot more than the corruption that takes place in the high-tech stuff.

Okey, to make it short the basic ideas are:

• Poke their hand everywhere to show that they can do what the big, technologically advanced nations can do (but it ends there... at the poking stage).
• Keep the morale of the people up --which would be at 0 if it were not for all this euphoria enducing techo-crap.
• Contrary to popular belief, these areas are are more difficult to swipe money from, (well, this is a relative concept), compared to the distribution of healthcare, economy (liberalisation, deregulation etc.), and food and stuff, where all the big bucks are.

The bottomline is that it is more PR, these vision are not realistic from the financial point of view --India doesn't have the money to pull this off, nor will they be ready to take money from the food-health-economy dept. and put it here, even with domestic private investors, for the simple reason that corrupt dudes would lose the easy buck and money laundering private businessmen will lose a lot of opportunities.