Indian Satellite Lost in Launch Explosion

An anonymous reader writes "BBC News is reporting that the recent communications satellite launch in India has met with disaster. The satellite, designed to enhance India's telephone and communications network, was lost when the rocket carrying it veered off course and exploded. This is the second disappointment in recent launch attempts, coming just one day after the failed long-range ballistic missile test launch."

Comments

It isn't as easy as it looks...

[Erwos]

I'm not surprised. It sounds easy to launch a rocket (hell, we've been doing it since forever, right?), yet in the light of this failure, North Korea's blown ICBM launch, and SpaceX's spectacular failure a while back, perhaps the difficulty of such things needs to be reassessed in the minds of the average Slashdot reader.

Certainly, the ESA and NASA have something to be proud of when they actually manage to get stuff into orbit :).

-Erwos

Re:It isn't as easy as it looks...

[EvanED]

What you say is true. Actually, last night I arrived back home after spending about 3 weeks at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range where a little over a week ago there was the launch of a sounding rocket I helped build the payload for as a project at college. Our launch was in conjunction with another launch from actual scientists in Europe called HotPay1. The HotPay launch came 26 minutes after ours. Unfortunately, 7 to 8 seconds into flight either the payload broke off the motor or the motor broke in half. (As of last I heard, they weren't sure what happened.) So these things still do NOT always go well.

And that was just a single stage sounding rocket too; not even in the same category as an orbital flight.

P.S. I'd have started this post with "you might even say 'it IS rocket science" but another poster took that joke already...

Props to India for trying

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a lot of respect for countries which have a space program and attempt to launch rockets into space, whether they succeed or not.

Re:disappointment?

[grapeape]

Actually it was one day after India tested their missile.

From the Article:
"It came a day after a test-fire of India's longest-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile ended in failure."

Yep, it didnt get much press, guess no one cared since it was a "friendly" country testing this time.

Re:well (Wrong)

[ZSpade]

Outsourced the shuttle to a private company
Nasa is looking to outsource even more!
The article title made me laugh in light of your comment.

Like almost every other branch of the government, NASA does outsource. They contract out the building of almost any sort of vehicle out to private companies who are all competing for it.

Now if you think I'm just picking apart your statement for fun, you're only half right, look at this:

In light of this article, scary.

Re:well

[dracken]

Maybe you should read this.

"India's six remote-sensing satellites - the largest such constellation in the world. These monitor the country's land and coastal waters so that scientists can advise rural communities on the location of aquifers and where to find watercourses, suggest to fishermen when to set sail for the best catch, and warn coastal communities of imminent storms (see "Eyes in the sky"). India's seven communication satellites, the biggest civilian system in the Asia-Pacific region, now reach some of the remotest corners of the country, providing television coverage to 90 per cent of the population. The system is also being used to extend remote healthcare services and education to the rural poor."

Or this about PSLV

"It was developed to allow India to launch its Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites into sun synchronous orbits, a service that was, until the advent of the PSLV, commercially viable only from Russia"

Re:India keep wasting money in pissing contests

[ScrewMaster]

Well, military applications aside, the truth of the matter is that satellites of all kinds have had a tremendous positive impact on economies and populations the world over. Communications, weather-monitoring, resource exploitation, scientific research ... no, I can't fault India for trying to use near-space to its advantage. Why not ... everyone else is. Besides, if you want to alleviate issues of social networking and education (two big steps towards improving living conditions in general) advanced communications are important. Satellite technology is one way to get that, and given the size and population of India, I would rather think that building out surface infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive, at least in the near term. Hell, it took the United States decades and billions of dollars to put a phone in every house, and I don't think India wants to wait that long.

Re:well

[rts008]

Very good reply! Well done.
This is what keeps me coming back to /. when I decide to give up on it due to the inane, kneejerk, blatant fanboy, etc. posts that are getting more numerous all the time.

Your post was:
concise, informative, not insulting/derogatory, and directly addressed the point.
I heartily give you A+ since I have no mod points to give. :)

Re:Indian Astronauts

[timeOday]

So what? I'd still go, and I think many others would volunteer for a one-way mission as well.

Not me. Frankly there are many more interesting places on Earth I haven'tseen yet (for that matter, India itself). The reason nobody has been to the moon for the last few decades is mainly because there's nothing much up there.

Re:well

[Kadin2048]

While I'm always up for an opportunity to bolster my sense of baseless, nationalistic superiority, NASA's had some strings of bad luck, too.

The Loss of Mars Observer. Oops.
Whatever Happened to the Mars Polar Lander? Double Oops.
NASA's metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss. Durh...

Space exploration -- even just putting stuff into orbit -- is a risky proposition at the best of times. Any agency pushing the envelope of what they've done before is bound to have some failures, but this is sometimes the price you pay for eventual success.