Slashdot Mirror
India Debating Manned Space Flight
alphakappa writes "India's moon mission and other space programs have been covered before on Slashdot. India is now debating sending a manned space mission and has acknowledged it's technological preparedness to do so in the next 6-7 years if given the go-ahead. The issues being debated before starting work on the mission include cost-benefit and other space priorities. (These missions also play host to international experiments) What does the general slashdot crowd think of these space plans?"
Of course being an Indian and having worked with ISRO I feel strongly about it. The space is definitely the next frontier. So far India has done incredible projects related to weather, remote sensing, etc. It's definitely time to venture into this. And this is not just showing technological superiority (and I definitely will see more posts on NASA outsorcing) but that's the proud thing that India can launch vehicles in space at much much lower costs. Putting this in perspective helps in going through further projects like star wars (when US is already thinking about making it a reality). Besides India also faces competition from its neighbor China in space frontiers.
a recent guardian weekly article states that it is not considered worth the estimated US$ 2 billion it would cost to put a man on the moon.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
With Brazil, Several Private groups, China, and India all now shooting for space it would hopefully put some pressure on our space spending which has dropped off considerably since the end of the cold war.
Perhaps if we convinced there was oil on the moon there would be more intrest but I belive the current compeition will help. It's bad enough our engineers are being squeezed out by cheap alternatives in other countries but losing out on our space program could have profound results elsewhere in our economy. We'll go from being a tech leader to a tech backwater. Were already there with our network infrastructure, were getting there with our engineering based workforces and high tech jobs going overseas.
Worse if you look at things you may notice that our society and economic structure may eventually destroy our country. With inflation on nearly everything it's becoming nearly impossible to compete with other countries. sure you can compare their living conditions vs ours but does everything here have to be so damned expensive? When I was born the average house sold for 55,000 dollars. Today you're lucky to see them in the 80's and the average is 250,000 where I live worse in some other areas. What justifies all that price jumping?
Worse is we have a president that went from a 5 trillion dollar surplus to hitting a 8 trillion dollar deficit. Where the hell did we spend all that money. IIRC those iraq spending bills were in the billions per year but looking at the deficit it's obvious that the money is going somewhere else unknown to the american public. Who are we paying and for what?
Too bad all the nations can't get into an agreement, if there was a single space program for the whole world, it'd be both easier to swallow from the economical point of view and would be good from a scientific point of view, instead of reinventing the wheel scientists could focus on the real problems.
As long as India is concerned, it's a bit harsh to spend bilions of dollars to send ppl into space, when so many in India are starving etc. However the problem is well beyond my comprehension, I bet that if they actually did spend the money just to buy some food, next ppl would be starving again, if however they spend on research, with some luck they will develop technological means to overcome poverty.
What bothers me most with developing countries is the fact that despite spreading diseases, high mortality, poverty, bad living conditions, the law (as in China) there is still growth in population. I won't have a child unless I can secure his future up until University at least, they just don't care...
why does it interest us? Because it is India? What about China, Canadian and other groups wanting to go to space?
Because developing and third-world nations are making huge strides in progress. The US accomplished this over 35 years ago, but that really does not mean much because they've competition from what were unlikely competitors, until a few years ago.
It shows that as a civilization we are progressing and moving forward - technology is not as much of a niche as it once was. What one country could achieve after putting in so much of time and effort has now been made a little easier and a little common place.
That is why this is important. That said, I'm quite certain that if NASA was to launch a manned mission, Slashdot would cover that too.