India Test-Fires Cryogenic Rocket Engine

alphakappa writes "Wired News reports that India has successfully testfired a cryogenic rocket engine that can be used to 'launch high-altitude satellites, send a man to the moon -- or build intercontinental ballistic missiles'. The rocket which typically has to fire for 12 minutes during flight was fired for 17 minutes during ground testing. So are we gonna see competition in the moon race? Remember, India has already spoken about sending a mission to the moon and it has joined the Galileo consortium along with China."

Comments

moon race? nah...

[Barbarian]

So are we gonna see competition in the moon race?

No, we're just going to see India launch a few satelites to show that they can (because if you can launch a satelite, you can build ICBM's), I doubt they will want to go to the moon.

Moonshot?

[jabberjaw]

So are we gonna see competition in the moon race?
Perhaps we should wait until India has actually placed someone in orbit before talking about a moonshot? I am all for an increase in competition when it comes to space, but aren't we getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves?

Re:moon race? nah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets also be realistic here; the only place India would want to hit with an ICBM is Pakistan, and they already have more conventional rockets which are plenty capable of doing that.

This rocket is just because they can, and no doubt also an attempt to attract international investment. After all, this is a great adverstisment for the education standards of your workforce if you're able to achieve complex technological goals like this.

Re:Abu

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow how smart! Mentioning "Apu" in ever India related story is getting to be as old as the stupid overlord shit

Re:Before

[Anonymous Coward]

Why steal? A significant of the students in US science and engineering programs are Indian, and I don't know how many are from China. It's funny, the US will "teach a man to fish" in countries that it bitches about IP theft, and will "give a man a fish" to 3rd world countries who really need some sort of economic base. Dumbasses.

And yet another competitor enters the race.

[Anonymous Coward]

The change is kinda interesting. Countries pouring their resources into science and exploration instead of another arms race (but it only takes one nation to start the whole thing again and if it happens there will be several players).

Spin offs include environmental technologies which never would have been developed. Smarter more exotic materials. Massive raw protein potential. Getting things to mars or even low earth orbit is alot easier from the moon then from earth. so on, so forth, etc.

Re:The government should try to solve that problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean... like the way the US should try to develop humanity and understanding, instead of launching phony wars for political and economic gain? ;)

We've all got our issues, but progress is still progress.

Why just Pakistan?

[bj8rn]

India has the second largest population in the world. They have nuclear weapons and are capable of building ICBM-s to carry those nukes. Now, why in the world should Pakistan be the only place they want to hit with those nukes, if they have the means to for more? Why not take on China or the Muslim world? I think the rocket is a way of showing the rest of the world that India is a player, too.

Re:Why just Pakistan?

[ScrewMaster]

And so here we are in the United States, where the "world is now safe for democracy" since the U.S.S.R. collapsed under its own weight almost twenty years ago. After the end of the Cold War, it was felt that the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction, the cornerstone of American politico-military relations with Russia since the Communists acquired the Hydrogen Bomb, was obsolete. Of course, the same thing was said about war after World War I. And World War II. And probably we'll say the same thing after World War III should any of us survive it.

The ONLY reason nuclear war didn't break out during those years was because a. we'd have volatilized them and b. the Russians were never quite sure their equipment would actually work. Furthermore, they knew that we were highly unlikely to ever fire the first shot.

Fast-forward to the present. Pakistan has atom bombs (only fission weapons at this point, I understand), India either does or isn't far behind and China most likely does but probably wouldn't admit it yet. Both India and China either have or are developing long range or spaced-based weapons delivery platforms. And no-one knows what the various terrorist groups out there are capable of now that they've had access to technology and technologists from the former Soviet Union, plus whatever they've managed to steal from us.

Given the political and economic instability of the Middle East and the Orient, I have no doubt that any of the major "peace loving" players would be perfectly capable of firing that first shot. And when that happens, having that many nuclear-armed "friends" in the same region will be unfortunate for all concerned.

All this tells me that the human race is, collectively, a slow learner. After all the criticism we took from the rest of the world over forty years of the Cold War, the rest of you fools are pursuing the same MAD course. May it serve you well. Just leave us the hell out of it.

Re:Why just Pakistan?

[demachina]

Odds are the next country to use nuclear weapons will be the same country that first and last used them, the U.S. The Bush administration has decided it would be a good idea to develop new, small, tacticial nukes to use on bunkers and have managed to fund it. Many in Congress are appalled and put constraints on the funding, R&D only, as well as a stipulation that Congress has to authorize deployment of these weapons. But once the ball gets rolling in a government that favors preemptive warfare you have to wonder...

Technicly nukes would be a great choice for busting bunkers but the obvious danger is that once you make it acceptable to use little nukes it will be a lot more palatable to use big ones and to use them to solve more problems.

Its so ironic to see U.S. politicians rail against WMD's when its fact the U.S. always has been and continues to be in the forefront of developing and using them. Many of the nuclear documents found in Iraq were from the Eisenhower administration's "Atoms for Peace" program and were definitely dual use. And, of course, the U.S.was actively supporting Iraq when Saddam began using using chemical weapons. At the time time we were using him a as a proxy to wage war against Iran and fundementalist Islam. Iran was in danger of winning the war by using human wave attacks of young boys to overrun Iraq's trenches. We almost certainly encouraged or turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons to stave off these attacks and certainly did supply Iraq with precursors for chemical and biological weapons, anthrax in particular. We also supplied them with cluster bombs from Chile to use against these human waves. Some of the key players at the time VP George H.W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

You can't really blame countries for wanting nukes and missiles. Its one of the few methods for insuring the U.S. and everyone elese doesn't f**k with you.

Re:Before

[MoP030]

Before anyone comes out and spouts the "stolen or bought technology" meme

...we should recall the meme that US and Soviet rockets are based on German rockets (further developed by German scientists).

Re:why the shift?

[Glock27]

Same reason the US did such a useless thing

Excuse me, but are you referring to the Apollo program as "useless"? If so, you are a fool.

In terms of long-term scientific and technological returns, the Apollo program in particular, and NASA in general have been some of the most well-spent gummint dollars in history.

It is also very hard to put a value on even one smart child who is inspired to do something great. I have never seen anything more inspirational in my life than the first man setting foot on the moon.

Re:moon race? nah...

[satyap]

This rocket is just because they can, and no doubt also an attempt to attract international investment. After all, this is a great adverstisment for the education standards of your workforce if you're able to achieve complex technological goals like this.

After all, that's the same reason why NASA exists.

Re:not the moon

[Scrameustache]

I am not a westerner trying to judge india, I am an indian , humbly pointing out what our top priorities should be.

I am a westerner and will now judge india in a burst of hubris:
I think India should also work on its leprosy poblem...and the plague.

Seriously, for a country to simultaniously have atomic weapons and diseases from the middle ages...that's scary.

Then again, there's been an increase in syphilis in the states lately...that's more 19th century than middle ages, but nobody's perfect.

/rant

Re:Before

[tealover]

Yeah, it was bad timing for the Germans. If they had waited a couple of years to begin WW2, they probably would have had usable rocket technology which may have changed the course of the war.

Thankfully, Hitler was an egotist and pushed thousands of German intellectuals out of Germany and to America and other Allied nations.

Re:am i the only one confused ?

[donutello]

The actual quote is:

Sharma said the technology was "crucial to the ultimate moon shot," alluding to India's plan to send a manned mission to the moon before 2015.

It sounds like it's the journalist who concluded that the "moon shot" was about sending a man to the moon instead of just a satellite.

Never attribute to malice what can just as easily be accounted for by bad journalism.

Nobody is going to build a cyrogenic ICBM

[Animats]

The US tried that in the 1950s. Atlas ICBMs were deployed from 1969 to 1965, but those missiles were replaced with solid fuel ICBMs as soon as it was possible to do so. Atlas boosters are still used as launchers, but their ICBM career was short.

Cyrogenic ICBMs are first-strike weapons. It takes so long to prep and fuel them that they're useless as a retaliation weapon. The opposition's ICBMs will land on your silos first. Keeping a cyrogenic system at a high state of readiness for years on end is difficult.

The Cuban missile crisis is sometimes said to have occured because the US put cyrogenic ICBMs in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union. That looked like the US was planning a first strike on Moscow. The Soviet Union had to respond to that threat.

(Decades later, interviews with the Soviet officials who made that decision revealed that most of them didn't look at it that way, but that's another issue. The communication-by-strategic-threat thing never worked as some of the gurus of deterrence thought it did. The most famous example of such miscommunication was that Kennedy's advisers thought the Soviet missile base in Cuba was deliberately laid out just like the ones in Russia so that the US would recognize it as a threat. Years later, the Red Army colonel in charge of building the base was asked about this, and said "No, we just did it that way because that's what the field manual said to do." All the military personnel present nodded in understanding.)

So it's a launcher, not an ICBM.

Re:not the moon

[frodo from middle ea]

Well , its similar in some aspects and not in many. When you say poverty in USA, it's meaning could vary from living in the streets of NY, to living on minimum wage jobs, living on social security etc.

When we say poverty in india, we mean being unable to provide oneself even with daily bread.

There is no govt. program (at least one that works), to educate, support or at the least feed the really really poor indians. Any money generated thru welfare organizations is socked up internally by politicians and officials.

The fast rise of Islam and Christanity in India is mainly due to FREE food provided by the mosques and churches to poor people. I am not a religiously biased person, so I am not critisizing either one, But when a religion starts to get converts because it provides free food, instead of its principals and ideologies, you start wondering about the entire system.