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India Joins Galileo Consortium

Posted by michael on from the bandwagon dept.

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."

7 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong "Galileo" link. by dbirchall · · Score: 4, Informative
    Galileo.com is, despite the image on its homepage that looks for all the world like a GPS mesh, a Central Reservation System in the travel industry. (It competes with best-known SABRE and also with WorldSpan and possibly others - it's been a little while since I worked for a division of the folks who own Galileo, so my memory's fading.)

    The European satellite navigation project Galileo is at http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/gal ileo/index_en.htm.

    That's what India and China are getting involved with. Airlines, not nations, get involved with Galileo.com.

  2. Heh by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Funny

    "India Joins Galileo Consortium"

    I haven't had enough sleep today. I read that as "Indiana Jones and the Galileo Consortium." I just had this image of Harrison Ford saying with that ever so famous smile on his face "The old fool was right, the Earth does orbit the sun."

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  3. Article has some misleading numbers by notyou2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    At present, the only global satellite system available to civilians is GPS, but it is accurate only to 100 metres (325 feet) for civilians, or 22 metres (71 feet) for the military, and is under the control of the Pentagon.

    What the hell are they talking about? With off-the-shelf equipment and a clear sky, you can easily get under 10-foot accuracy (I do on a very regular basis). With averaging and/or fancy equipment you can easily exceed that, too.

    If they're talking about accuracy while the military has implemented that signal degredation stuff, it's misleading not to mention that fact. But either way, the military would still be able to do a hell of a lot better than 71-foot accuracy... that's ridiculous.

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    DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
  4. It's not how much you spend... by Tau+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ... 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.

    --
    Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
  5. Re:India & China by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Our American political, educational and economic problems, never insignificant, are starting to counterbalance our original advantages of unspoiled resources, strategic position, and freedom. In Confucian China, complacency is a sin; in America, it's a way of life.

    --

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    make install -not war

  6. Re:India & China by fault0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    > India has an illiteracy rate about 70%.

    Erm, that hasn't been true since around 1970.

    Indian Literacy Rates:
    1951 - 18.33%
    1961 - 28.31%
    1971 - 34.45%
    1981 - 43.56%
    1991 - 52.21%
    2001 - 65.38%

    Assuming another 13% Jump in literacy, India will be at western standards in less than twenty years. It might even be faster than that, because between 1991 and 2001, there was greater change in India as a whole in terms of economic reforms than the whole fifty years since Indian independence before that. In any case, there is already more literate people in India than in the US.

  7. more articles by jubalj · · Score: 4, Informative

    okay the story doesnt really have that much information, if you want to find out more, try:

    http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2003
    http://w ww.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2003%2F10%2F31%2Fwspace31.xml
    http://www.s pacedaily.com/2003/031030141843.79tqo7 1o.html
    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articl eshow/293 953.cms
    http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,478 9-184676_ W_1017248,00.html
    http://english.peopledaily.com. cn/200310/28/eng200 31028_126977.shtml

    that should quench your thirst!