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India Brings Back Orbiting Satellite to Earth

bharatm writes "In a pathbreaking event heralding its arrival as a space power with capability to recover an orbiting satellite, India today successfully brought back a spacecraft to earth, giving a new impetus to the proposed manned mission to space in the next decade."

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Katrina Re:Priorities by nomadic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?

    Yep. I think most people here are not going to argue that the Iraq war is worth the expense.

    Each nation has its own priorities, and while you spout an altrustic question, the same was true in 1969 when UJS landed a man on moon.
    The poverty in US at that time was high enough.


    No, it wasn't. I think parent's argument isn't that you have to completely wipe out poverty, but that the level of poverty in India is so bad that a space program really is a waste of money. The poverty in the US in 1969 is still exponentially less than in modern-day India.

  2. Re:Priorities by mdwh2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What is it about space stories (whether it's the US, or elsewhere) that always brings out the "Won't somebody think of the poor?" comments?

    I knew I'd see something like this as soon as I saw this article - and indeed, two comments in the top ten posts.

    Why do people not make the same charitable "Think of the poor" suggestions for other things? Most notably military spending, but Governments spend all sorts of money on things other than helping poor people. No one complains then. Indeed, usually you get the opposite response - "Why should I have to pay for poor people?"

  3. Re:Priorities by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Improving communications is so important for the agriculture sector. So many poor Indian farmers harvest their perishable crop and bring it to the market to sell at market price manipulated by the local agents/middlemen. Knowing what is the price in the town 15 km to the south vs the price in 14 km to west will mean a difference of 30% in revenue to the guy tending a half acre plot growing eggplants.

    One of the interesting side effects of the cell phone explosion in rural India is that these farmers negotiate deals with big city wholesalers directly and skip one, two or sometimes even three levels of aggregators. Savvy farmers are cutting out the commissions to the middlemen by a large extent.

    Of course weather prediction is another huge factor for Indian agriculture.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact