Slashdot Mirror
India Joins Galileo Consortium
ghoul writes "Yahoo! is reporting that both India and China have joined the Galileo Consortium as part of an effort at building a Multipolar world.
Of note is the fact while China is giving money (200 Million Euros) India is giving 350 million Euros(almost half a billion dollars) in parts and services as Indian satellite makers are considered world class. Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China. After all one of them is 1/6th of the world and the other 1/5th."
As a citizen of the USofA I face facts about the huge wastes of money we endure every day, such as:
- The dead-end Space Shuttle program
- Farm subsidies
- Ethanol subsidies (which intersect somewhat with the above)
- Mandated "special education" to the student's needs regardless of cost, while regular classrooms languish and the gifted are conspicuously neglected
- Million-dollar healthcare for very premature infants (who will be lucky to ever get past "special ed")
That doesn't include other things which could save piles of money, such as making the people who "develop" rural areas pay the full cost of all the roads, sewers, schools and whatnot that they require while abandoning cities where all those things already exist.Getting back to space, it no longer surprises me that the price of several Apollo projects has not taken humans beyond LEO in 3 decades nor given us a real space station, while a few tens of millions in SDIO gave us an SSTO technology demonstrator and one aerospace engineer was able to construct a scenario for a full manned mission to Mars for a fraction of the Shuttle budget. It disgusts me, but it is not surprising... it's all money politics, and the future is sold down the river because it has no constituency while the past chows down at the trough. Kind of like the pandering to old people with "free" drugs while the children whose future is going to be largely determined in classrooms over the next 10 years are ignored beyond mandates on top of mandates which all go unfunded.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Actually in todays service oriented world what matters is more the no of skilled people you have to do the work than the amount of land. For example Japan is much more densely populated than India and is a rival to a United States 50 times larger.
Till now Indias population was that while it had the population the population was not skilled which made it a liability instead of a resource but now the trickle down effect of the nuclear and space programs is being felt in higher levels of education and competency at all levels
**Life is too short to be serious**
Indian economic potential will be witnessed in few years. Despite the Asian currency crisis, India fared very well. Indian economy is booming right now. Indian space program is painfully put together with many setbacks. Let's give credit to a developing nation that has built it's own launch vehicles and satellites that are very good.