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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."
Is test an ASAT missile.
(I'm sure that's coming.)
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Holy Cow!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When I first read the headline and blurb I thought India retrieved a satellite. As in how the Space Shuttle can go up, retrieve a satellite that otherwise is not designed for reentry, and bring it back to earth. This craft was designed for reentry in the first place, so they didn't really "bring" it back - they commanded it to return on its own.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
And what about sharks?? That would be evil!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
I was in India last year; the poverty and malnutrition in the outlying areas is simply heart-breaking. Worse than anywhere else that I've been. Call me old-fashioned, but before a gov't starts acting on all of their world-stage aspirations, shouldn't they feed their citizens?
I guess that one could make the case that India's space program is an investment in the future, but I wouldn't want to be the one to try to sell that to people who don't have enough food.
Ya know, I just had an epiphany on outsourcing to India...
We all know the popular press about issues regarding process, quality, et al. with Indian Outsourcing. However: I recall that once upon a time, Japanese manufacturing was the butt of many a joke until the early 1970s.
Just saying, I would suggest that any smirking in the direction of the Indian Outsourcing phenomenon is a little premature because I imagine it is inevitable that these issues will eventually be worked out.
Wikipedia has a pretty good page on reentry technologies. Not that trivial to get all the systems perfected! A developing country like india needs this impectus to excite younger generation about science and space.
"Feed your children India!
(Score:0, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22, @09:16AM (#17709874)
why dont these heartless hindus use some of their engineers to design sanitation systems, water purification plants, food preservation technologies etc? This sorry excuse of a nation has the world's largest concentration of hungry people without access to clean water or toilet facilities. Shame on them!"
He does have a point however. "The World's Largest Democracy" (tm)
India spends a lot of effort on developing military capabilities. Feeding their people is obviously not a priority.
India spends a lot of effort on developing military capabilities. Feeding their people is obviously not a priority.
Again: see my first post on this.
It's well and good for us Westerners to wag our fingers at them, but we're not the ones sharing borders with their potentially hostile neighbors (Pakistan, China).
You know, there are millions of undernourished people in the U.S. too. It would have been nice if our government fed it's citizens before acting on all of it's "world-stage aspirations."
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.
Best to retrieve it before China shoots it down I guess.
Nothing witty
Yes...a troll found a perfect moment to troll. Any news on India and there is a always a stereotypical response like cheap labour, not-enough-food-to-eat.
BTW, what you call cheap labour (in terms of U.S or any western currency) is a high enough pay for middle-class Indians. With around 30,000 rupees, average Indian family can live a life equivalent to a life of a average US family with income of around 70K. And that estimate is a conservative one...most engineers I know get paid around 25,000-30,000 rupees right out of college these days.
I do volunteer work in the inner-city and in rural Appalachia so I've seen first-hand the things that your link indicates, but the poverty in these places simply does not compare to what one will see in some of the places (India, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Pakistan) that I've been.
Yes, there is work to be done in the US but it's mostly treatment and/or education. Your post, however, glibly trivializes the dire circumstances that exist in many parts of the world where there simply is not enough food.While anyone can cook up stats about hunger, there is a simple test that can indicate the true level of hunger in an area: offer a half-eaten sandwich (or whatever) to someone in the street and see the reaction. In the inner-city area near us where I serve, that will at least get you cussed out, if not get the crap beaten out of you. However, we have had six-year-old children at an outdoor restaurant in Oaxaca, Mexico, gratefully eat the last bite of our salad. Similar results in the countries listed above.
The fact is that there is hunger in some instances in the US, but it is more often due to parents' mental illness or drug/alcohol use than to a general lack of food availability. Often there is enough money but it is squandered on other things. In many cases in rural Appalachia, we have gone to houses where the kids truly do not have enough to eat and yet the parents have Marlboros (not even generics) and/or satellite TV. There's not much that can be done when parents care more about smoking and television than feeding their kids. Also, have you never heard of the Hunger/Obesity Paradox. Read up, becuase in America, the poorest kids are also the fattest.
Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?
The US was in the Iraq war before Katrina hit.
The poverty in US at that time was high enough.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. The poverty line in India is a whopping 1 US dollar per day according to the world bank, and the government on India puts it at around a third of that. About 75% of India is under this level. In the US however, the poverty line is $9800 per year, about thirty times that of India, and only 12.7% (as of 2004) of the population fall beneath that. Comparing the US investment in space with the Indian investment in space given their relative domestic situations is a bit ludicrous.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
I just started humming the theme from "Moonraker"
I'm very sure that the budgeting issues between these two activities are so insanely far apart, that any sort of comparison would be impossible to make.
Tossing a rocket into space with a vehicle built for re-entry would be a lot easier and cost a lot less than making sure everyone in a country containing 1.2 billion people will be fed properly.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Let's see, how much food is wasted in building a satellite? Unless the rocket burns flour or vegetables, I can't see how not launching it would contribute to feeding anyone.
Or do you mean the money spent in the program should be used to buy food and give it to the needy? In that case, perhaps not launching one rocket would ease the hunger of a few million people. Today. But what about tomorrow? How do you propose to end once and for all the chronic problems of malnutrition in India? The Indian space program is giving their people a future, something that's infinitely more valuable than a plate of food.
Epiphany, huh? Actually, if you read even popular press, you'll see that countries such as India and China are commonly referred to as "developing" countries. This means that some day soon they are widely expected to be on par with other "developed" countries such as Japan, South Korea, etc. If this sort of thing interests you, pick up the Economist or a similar magazine and you'll get some estimates about when this might occur.
On another tangent, if you go back in time a little further, you'll learn that Japanese manufacturing was considered world-class after their battleships knocked out most of the Russian west fleet around the turn of the century and was continued to be considered so until the Americans came knocking thirty-some years later.
I think you're right about Americans being arrogant, however. There are a lot of other people smarter and harder working than the average American out there, and global trade doesn't care if you think you're superior if someone else can do the same job better for less money.
So, if everything should be done to feed the hungry right now, without regard to the future, what are you doing in Slashdot? Sell your computer, give up your internet service, spend *EVERYTHING* to feed a starving Indian child!!
Why are you scoundrels unable to feed half your children
You seem to be under the impression that I'm an Indian. I'm not.
I certainly hope not.
This is the first step by India, hopefully, towards establishing the first Quickie Mart on the moon!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And oh, these satellite thingys have helped improve agriculture by weather forecasting, geological and geographical surveys, communications etc. Amongst other things, such as education, industrialization, early weather warning systems and the like. Good point. Seriously, I hadn't really considered that. I wonder if going to the moon helps too.
But hey, you go ahead. In your total idiocy and lack of vision, sit there mocking at technological achievements which are the crux for the foundation and development of any society. Way to go, Strawman! I never mocked technological achievements. Not once.
What sheer stupidity. Denying a man his dream is the worst kind of sin one could commit. Such an asinine statement, that it doesn't really need to be refuted...but what the heck. A man (or woman) doesn't have the right to fulfill his/her dream on public money. Public money is presumably for the public good. If it is his/her dream, let him come up with or raise the cash like Jeff Bezos.
But hey, if the gutter smells wonderful to you, who am I to stop you from sniffing at it. Those that can dream will dream. Dream on then, Oh Great Strawman Dreamer!
Less developed countries do export cash crops. But rich farmers are the true benefactors of the "Green Revolution". Poor farmers cannot afford the patented seeds, tractors, fuel, and everything that's needed to produce the crops American science has developed.
To feed the starving, many small social actions are needed, such as better education, professional training, crop diversity using native plants which have evolved to be resistant to local pests, etc. This is an effort that does not compete and can perfectly well coexist with and profit from space science. I agree. My wife and I have been very active for over ten years in efforts to bring this training and technology to third-world countries. I travel outside the US to teach certain aspects at least twice a year. More help is needed, especially from the type of technologically savvy people you find on