Slashdot Mirror
India and NASA to Explore Moon Together
hotsauce writes "NASA administrator Griffin on a visit to Indian space facilities in Bangalore has signed an agreement to explore the moon with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This agreement will see NASA instruments on a 2008 Indian moon mission, and further cooperation is being explored. An Indian paper has a different take on the visit. Interesting answer by Griffin on NASA outsourcing to ISRO."
And you thought the latency on calls to Dell's help desk was bad now...
Trolling is a art,
Curried Tang
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.
wow. how can such a (presumably) well educated crowd as slashdot remain so fricking ignorant about the world? whats with all these racist jokes? sometimes when i read slashdot's blatant racism, methinks that india is doing the world a huge favor by taking away valuable jobs from the hands of such ignorance.
first, you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india, despite having wrecked the indian economic potential far more surely than the americans did the japanese. you forget that india suffered 200 yrs of brutal colonial rule that left all but a tiny fragment of its ppl uneducated. you forget that under colonialism, indians weren't even allowed to run anything that resembled industry... it was illegal to do more than grow basic commodity crops for british consumption. when india got indepedence, it had an industrial revolution to catch up on. japan did not have to go through that -- they had industrial know-how all along.
the indian space research organization is single-mindedly dedicated to the development of technology that benefits civilians. you can read about that yourself. the moon-mission is the first gamble they are taking wherein they hope that a challenging outer-space mission will both boost their technological know-how and in turn help civilians in the future, and also ignite the minds of indian children regarding technology and space. yes, i understand that americans who were born before the 90s can't see anything outside the cold-war prism. but really, indians just want to push their technology further...
why did japan not invest into military and nuclear technology the way india has? simply b/c it has always been under the american military and nuclear umbrella. india, on the other had, was treated as a pariah by the US for not kowtowing to american foriegn policy. india has had to suffer embargos and sanctions for its right to defend itself. in contrast the obstentatiously peace-loving japanese could pretend that it didn't want to develop a strong military or militaristic technology, when in reality it has just counted on the US to protect it.
ok, enough. i'm not getting paid to educate this lot. nor is it entirely feasible.
"Why did Japan succeed but India fail?"
I think comparision between India and Japan is wrong. Japan was fighting the world during WWII i.e. it was a world power, India at the time was coming out of a British rule that had slaved it.
All Japan really had to do is recover from WWII and the nukes. India had to start from scratch. Its only been 55 odd years or so since British rule ended in India. 55 Years is not a lot of time for a country to get freedom and stand on its feat.
Closest I would compare here is that Japan has succeeded and India is still writing its exam, judgement is still out.
There is a reason to why everyone is worried about outsourcing to India. This is also where NASA can learn from India. Budget for ISRO is nothing compared to that of NASA, nonetheless ISRO is in a select class of organization that has managed to launch a one ton plus satellite into orbit.
This is where NASA has most to gain, getting things done for lesser costs. Further, no single event except for wars have helped technology as much as NASA's Man on the Moon mission.
ISRO's exploration of the moon has similar objectives as well.