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India's Successful Commercial Satellite Launch
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday India successfully launched an Italian astronomical satellite. A BBC article (view video clip) notes that the launch grants India membership in the exclusive group of nations that can sustain commercial satellite launches. India's launch vehicle has less overall capacity than the competition — up to 1,500 kg to orbit — but the country plans to sweep the low end of the market by offering the lowest cost per launched kilogram for smaller payloads."
I think that this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research _Organisation article has some good details about the Indian Space program, for those interested.
It is a good job, but launching rockets is not rocket science. One dark possibility is that they are having problems with the six strap on booster configuration and are trying to salvage a reduced capacity vehicle from the detritus of a failed project. I remember the crash of ASLV (a fore runner of PSLV, two strap on booster on their basic SLV-3). My prof was in the post martem committee and was ranting on and on about how dumb their simulation of booster rocket was. "Thrust is 100% for 45 seconds and 0% after that? Why didn't the stupid hacks code up the table of thrust vs time from the static firing?" or something along those lines.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I left E.U., Japan, U.S. and Russia out because they are already major players.
India had launched commercial satellites way back in 1999 "IRS-P4 (OCEANSAT), launched by Polar Satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C2) along with Korean KITSAT-3 and German DLR-TUBSAT from Sriharikota (26 May 1999)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research _Organisation
Actually the Italians have what seems to be a productive (if low budget) space agency. While they don't run many of their own high profile missions, they have payloads attached to both the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Casini-Huygens mission.
Not to mention that the top orbital mechanics professor in my department is an Italian, and the Italian grad students I've gotten to work with have been wonderful. Plus of course Galileo himself was Italian as well, even if his government and church weren't the most supportive.
Source: http://www.hindu.com/2007/04/24/stories/2007042414 931500.htm
While the international rates for launching a satellite ranged between $10,000 and $15,000 a kg, Antrix Corporation Limited (The marketing agency of the Department of Space, India) charged more because Agile had to be put into a specific orbit of about 550 km at a low inclination of 2.5 degrees to the equator, Mr. Sridhara Murthi said. This was a difficult orbit and inclination to achieve, and hence the premium rates.
"India is the fifth entry into the commercial satellite launch business after the US, Russia, China, Ukraine and the European Space Agency", says http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s19047 77.htm and many other reports.
Well, good lucky bringing democracy to Brasil. Because (don't they teach history and geography around there? wherever there is), Brazil is already a democracy, and a strong one too. The current president, Lula, just won the second term receiving impressive 58.2 million votes, after winning his first term with 56.7 million votes, for a population of around 180 million people.
Compare that with 50.4 million votes for Bush on his first term, and 62 million votes on his second term, to measure the strength of Brazilian democracy, taking in account that, differently from U.S.A, not only there are more than 2 effective parties in Brazil but any candidate from any party appears equally on the ballots in the whole federal territory.
Add that to a nationwide deployed electronic voting system (even in the middle of the amazon forest there is electronic voting) that really works, and you can understand how much Brazilian people trust the electoral process there, unlike U.S.A.
I cannot speak for India (that happen to be a democracy too, afaik), but at least Brazil needs no help from U.S. Actually, the more far away U.S. gets from Latin America democracies, the better (go lookup "Operation Condor" and "Escuela de las americas" to understand how U.S. undermine Latin American democracies in the past).