Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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).