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."

Comments

It's not how much you spend...

[Tau Zero]

... it's what you get for your money.

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.