Slashdot Mirror
Planning Phase Complete For Indian Moon Mission
alphakappa writes "According to news reports, India's low-cost moon mission -- Chandrayan -- has completed its planning phase and will be deployed in 2007-2008 as planned. The interesting aspect is that the entire mission is expected to cost only around USD 88 million. How do you think space technology will change as a result of these low cost missions, satellites and space vehicles?"
Even if it's "only" USD 88 million, I think this money could be much better spend, especially in a country like India where a lot of people don't have access to basic modern comfort...
India is a country in which a veritable sea of people is living in appaling conditions. OK, the mission is only ~80 million dollars, bravo for them. But what is the point? Are they going to get any crucial new data on what the Moon rock is made of?
Or is this solely a demonstration of power? A sort of an international dick-waving contest? You are not grown up until you send some expensive junk to the moon or something? Those eighty million might have bought the country one more university or one more hospital - which, I believe, have a better chance of saving / educating a person which makes an important scientific discovery than that pile of junk has of making a good return on its moon trip.
Why, why? Poverty in rural India is an enormous problem and a socio-economic gulf is emerging between city-dwellers and the rural population. Improved irrigation is desperately needed in those areas, and after that we can start talking about electricity and phone services. This is a massive problem. Additionally, infrastructure in the cities also needs very serious work - some IT firms have their own generators because the grid is too unreliable. Essentially, India is struggling to support its growth. This space mission is quite simply money spent on Indian pride that can only matter to so many considering the direness of the circumstances mentioned above.
Very well put point (except the last obvious jab at the Yanks!)
But my choice would have been to have had none of this moon race stuff. Vastly expensive and lets face it, a very piss poor return on the investment.
We need to think more about people. Healthcare, clean water etc. For gods sake, when we have people dying because they cannot get clean water WTF are we doing trying to land an object the size of a bus on the moon?
One of the reasons why they can keep the cost down is the lack of safety. In India, human lives aren't considered very valuable. And, before you mod me as flamebait, let me tell you where I got this from. I was visiting India at the time where the tensions between India and Pakistan was high. Both countries threatened with nuclear weapons. The indians I spoke with all said the same thing, when I asked them if they weren't concerned with a nuclear war: "So they drop the bomb on us, and 50 million people die. Big deal, we're still a billion people. So we drop the bomb om them, and kill 50 million people and win the war."
Of course, this point of view is very different from our western view, and very difficult for us to understand. But we do spend a lot of money on safety - not only in the space industry, but elsewhere. And that can make a big difference in project cost.
Underholdning.info
A. It won't.
This model already has changed space exploration quite a bit. Cassini, now doing its work around Saturn, is a very different sort of robotic probe from everything else in the news mostly because it obeys the old model: everything in one big attempt, custom-built, extreme redundancy in systems. That's the all-eggs-in-one-basket, classic way of doing it. And Cassini's a big success so far.
For a long while now, though, NASA has also been firing much lower-cost, higher-risk probes out. Those are simpler probes, designed to do two or three types of things, they use systems that aren't all custom-made for their purpose, and as a result they're higher-risk but cheaper and you can do more of them. Each probe has a more limited set of goals. You lose more, but when you lose one you haven't lost everything. The development cycle is shorter, so you're not wedded to technologies that were current ten years ago when your project started up.
Beagle's lander was just a miss. The Mars Express orbiter with the same mission worked successfully. You accept those chances if you're going with this model.
Cost of Cassini mission: "$3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle." (NASA)
Cost of the Pathfinder mission that landed in '97: under $150 million. "The mission has the primary objective of demonstrating the feasibility of low-cost landings on and exploration of the Martian surface." That's NASA explaining its mission objectives. The rovers over on Mars right now are the descendents of that mission.
There's real tension between these approaches, and real tension between the costs and benefits of putting people up there vs. these unmanned missions. But change space technology? Low-cost missions have already done that, no question at all.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm sure some poeple on /. are racist, but get a reality check. Most people are just ignorant.
Perhaps it is you that needs the reality check. Ignorance, especially willful ignorance, is a cornerstone of racism. What's truly amusing is how many who don't consider themselves racist in the least engage in unconscious racism all the time. This is also willfully ignorant, because it is being willfully ignorant of oneself.
If the article was about Canada trying to send a probe to the moon, do you think that most people would have the first clue about the Canadian space program and its accomplishments?
If the article were about Canada's space program, comments about Canada's economic status and suffering millions wouldn't get modded up as insightful. You wouldn't have posters suggesting that the money would be better spent on a hospital or feeding the hungry and then getting that post modded up as insightful.
Slashdotters wouldn't accuse the Canadians of "diplomatic dick waving" and get modded up as insightful.
You wouldn't have the not so well hidden rage at outsourcing if it was about Canada.
When someone said something as a joke, it would get modded as either funny or as a troll, not insightful or interesting.
I say this is because of racism, but it could also be that Canada is really nothing more than the 51st state of the United States, with the delusion that they have sovereignty. We let it slide, like we do with Texas, that other state full of delusional idiots. At least Canada contributes some pretty good comics to our Cultural Hegemony. Judging by the criminals that come out of Texas and move to Washington DC, Texas is sort of an Australia in reverse.
Which brings me around. . . You shouldn't feel bad about being a crummy Canadian. At least you're not Australian.
Update: I just read your links to the CSP and it's accomplishments. Funny, I never thought of hitchhiking as an accomplishment before. Maybe someday your country won't be second rate and be able to launch things into space with it's own rockets. Sheeesh, no wonder you're our 51st State. Backwards people like the Indians have more ambition than you do. Maybe if your country didn't practice a luke warm form of socialism, you could afford a REAL space program.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.