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India Launches 10 Satellites At Once
freakxx writes "India sets a world record after launching 10 satellites in one go using its workhorse, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). All the satellites were put into their respective orbits successfully. It was the core-alone version of the launch vehicle weighing 230 tonnes with a payload of 824 kg in total. Two of the satellites were Indian satellites, while the rest were from different countries. By this launch, the ISRO has proven its credibility and it is going to boost India's image in the attractive multi-billion commercial market of satellite launches. This was the 12th successful launch of the PSLV."
You ever seen how many people they can pack in a single traincar?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But what about those 1 billion people (ok, number out of ass, but you get the point) that are starving to death and live in horrible conditions?
Leave it to a Mac fanboi to make everything into a joke about Vista tech support.
One of the satellites is made by students at Aalborg University.
You can follow the status here:
http://aausatii.space.aau.dk/eng/
because as a world there is enough wealth to end hunger.
Yet we don't because it is not so PC to remove the many reasons for that hunger. We also do not have the stomach for it (no pun intended) because it would cost us lives to remove the leadership that routinely starves their own populations.
India is coming forward rapidly, by advancing space science they advance all their sciences. They also give their people something to strive for - something they can show children that India is and what they can become. Let alone the fact that satellites provide better weather monitoring , can track crops and movement of animals. The possibilities of helping their own are a hundredfold, let alone what they can do for others.
Oh, before you troll India again I must ask, did you buy food out this week? If so, why? There are lots of poor people who could have used it in rice to feed a family... so why didn't you help? Oh, yeah, thats because its easier to be a forum troll and blame others for not doing instead of doing yourself.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Someone should tell the European Union about this way of launching satellites... then the politicians might stop wasting vast amounts of European taxpayers money on their own vastly over-budget but completely worthless GPS system, using the tracking of road drivers as one excuse for it's existence.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
2. What better way to improve living conditions than to become a hub for space technology?
3. I think you may be under some misconceptions about the state of Indian rural life as compared to, for example, the state of Mississippi.
If you're not sure that you know what you're talking about, perhaps you should do some research. If you had, you'd be able to say something like:
India has twice the poverty rate of, for example, the U.S., though that has dropped substantially since their independence and is widely seen as a potential model for a rapid exit from third-world status for other nations.
last year. But still, it's impressive. Although I think they're putting them in SSO and not LEO just yet.
Of one day looking up and really noticing that the available amounts of sunlight has been diminishing due to the rampant expansion of tracking and communications satellites being pushed into orbit by all the nations of the earth.
Then we begin to see the outcome as diminished crops, rampant expansion of the polar ice belts, strange drops in cancer rates from excessive sunlight exposure in bikini clad Caucasian women;... And some strange little guy on the global news service saying something about "the sky is falling; the sky is falling!"...
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2) High tech stuff like this creates jobs for academics and skilled workers, who'll be part of India's growing middle class. I believe that creating wealth top-down, by having wealth trickle down from an affluent and productive middle class to the poor, works a hell of a lot better than forever "giving that man a fish to eat".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Most of the above posts make fun of India. Well I must say that this record is quite impessive considering all the fuss the ESA made over their launch of two satellites in a row few years ago.
Few things I have noticed the last years:
Sure they still have a long road ahead (poverty, bureaucracy, nationalism, protectionism,akward traditions, etc.) but they are definitely on the right path.
I'm always amazed by this kind of arrogance towards developing nations. This kind of comment is seen any time there's a post about the OLPC project, for example.
Do you really think it would be productive if the government of India spent its entire time trying to directly alleviate hunger and poverty? Don't you think that encouraging industries that provide high-paying jobs is a good part of a long-term strategy to improve people's lives?
More to the point, did it never occur to you as a (presumably) well-educated, technically-inclined person that education, science and technology were part of the solutions to the developing world's problems, not just a distraction?
-Esme
Too bad it wasn't 8 satellites, then they could have named them: Anoop, Uma, Nabendu, Poonam, Priya, Sandeep, Sashi and Gheet - and then the rocket itself would have been: Apu
Look at how they used to pack passengers in Japanese trains in 1991 Video of Japanese train in 1991!!
India's New Cheap Fuel-less Bike
The Delfi-C3 sat is relying on the Amateur Radio operators around the world to help capture telemetry and forward it to their earth station. Pretty cool, in my book.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Every time I read a comment like this, I don't know what to say.
Do you know what is the single biggest thing that has helped poor farmers all across India? Please visit http://www.echoupal.com/
It is a website for small farmers. Even for those farmers who don't have Internet, there are kiosks in villages where volunteers explain them and help them use the website.
Using this, the farmers network and help each other solve problems. Single biggest benefit of this has been spotting and eliminating corrupt middlemen who give unfairly low price to farmers and sell it for high price to traders. This one advantage is worth entire effort behind this initiative.
Unfortunately Western media does not find these stories interesting. They love to show poor hungry children begging for food. Then they get to portray the Western world as the noble minded donor.
The truth is even poor people want to work hard and improve their lifestyle. Information technology, Internet, communication infrastructure, is what will give them a chance. It is absolutely right thing if a poor country with a billion hungry people launches satellites. It is better than a rich country launching wars.
I am an Indian. I live in New Delhi. Having a a fair amount of exposure to the business world (2 decades), I have experienced more than my share of arrogance and well, I also have experienced the brilliance of the people from US and Europe. Things are changing, attitudes to Indians are becoming a little more respectful (though we tend to exasperate a lot of people with our casual attitude at times ...)
India had made immense investments in education, science, technology, poverty alleviation schemes and infrastructure etc... though not always wisely, efficiently and hardly ever in ways free from corruption and exploitation by the political-business interest groups,
Thankfully, something still got through to the people and they made the best use of it.
That is the story of India: We are making it despite the government, which much to its dismay (any govt in power, I am happy to say, is discovering this), is finding that it has to give back to the people something, else it gets voted out of power.
Democracy rocks. In India, it may be chaotic, but at the end of the day it works.
I dunno why. :)
I am loving it!
Capitalism is the Opium of the Masses; Customer is King is the slogan.
Here's a funny thought:
1. India has nukes. (It also sits on huge reserves of Thorium and has breeder reactors, so it can transform them to uranium or eventually plutonium, as needed.)
2. If you can put an object in orbit, you can make it come down wherever you want it to come down. Or use a smaller rocket and/or a heavier load to make them go ballistic instead of orbitting at all. (For reference, the USSR's space program started the other way around. Someone realized that they had build a rocket so powerful to haul nukes, that it could put a small-ish object in orbit.) Rockets are that interchangeable purpose.
3. Inclined/polar orbits? Always good to have for a nuke, if nothing else, to hit a location that's not near the equator. Plus you might want to go extremely inclined to minimize flight time and thus warning time (I think both the USA and the USSR had most of their nukes aimed at each other over the arctic), or to lob them over international waters and avoid pissing off everyone else in their path.
As a bonus: once you can do polar orbits and big payloads, you can use spy sats.
Now I'm not saying India is necessarily aiming to become an ICBM power. Maybe, maybe not. And they're probably not yet ready to willy-wave internationally about it, in any case. But I'm saying I wouldn't be the least surprised if that was at least one factor in funding that space program.
I still remember seeing the news on TV when they had built their first nuke, and the general euphoria. It was waay back, while they were even poorer than today. Arguably that money could have been better invested in industrializing a little faster. But there were people cheering in the streets that they now have a big destructive weapon. I can see a lot of political capital in the implicit "and now we can lob it at anyone too!" message.
Now I'm not singling India out there. I think they're just... humans, like everyone else. And it's a sad thing that we'd rather have a big stick to threaten the neighbours with, than an extra slice of bread.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.