Slashdot Mirror
India Moves To Put Its First Man In Space By 2016
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from the International Business Times: "India plans to launch its first manned space mission in 2016, moving to become the fourth nation to put a man in space. Space scientists and senior officials of the state-run ISRO are preparing a pre-project report to build the infrastructure and facilities for the mission, estimated to cost a $2.76 billion. 'We are planning a human space flight in 2016, with two astronauts who will spend seven days in the Earth's lower orbit,' Radhakrishnan told reporters at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore. In September, India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite discovered water on the moon, boosting India's credibility among established space-faring nations"
While in geo-synchronise orbit over every major continent, call center employees will be available to answer your computer questions both day and night.
Ha ha. Let's make fun of the Indians and run through the usual 'call center' jokes because nobody has ever though of that before, huh?
This announcement comes on the same day that it has emerged that the US administration has no intention of going to the moon, in a time when the US national debt clock has needed an extra digit added to it, when the US is still recovering from the diplomatic and geo-political catastrophe what was the Bush years, and all you can do is crack jokes about Indians because they have started turning a hugely populated and impoverished country around using the latest opportunities afforded to them by technology. Hmmm.
Enjoy your inflated sense of superiority while it lasts, because it isn't gonna as long as people like you sit back on the Apollo moon landing's laurels and fiddle while Rome burns. The developing world is emerging onto the world stage. The EU is already the world's biggest economy. China and India have poverty on the run and are making in-roads into LEO. What's the USA doing? Still putting out fires in Mesopotamia, trying to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world in figuring out how to treat people when they're sick, and figuring out how to stop consuming a quarter of the world's resources.
Yup, you go right on cracking your jokes. Ha fucking ha. You won't be laughing so loud when you see the red flag of China over the Sea of Tranquility.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Even if Constellation wasn't cancelled, there were no plans to launch people before 2016. I mean, come on, it was only announced in 2004. Nobody could possibly go from paper project to manned mission in 12 years! Its not possible!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Don't confuse ability with necessity. Remember the whole "fast, good, cheap: pick two" thing? When you offshore your software development to India, you're always aiming for cheap and almost always aiming for fast. It's not their fault that their clients don't care about the end-product actually being good. I've met plenty of good Indian coders and plenty of bad American coders. It's like buying stuff made in China - it's not inherently worse, but the goals of the people ultimately selling the product care more about getting it cheap and fast and are willing to sacrifice in quality. Yet my laptop, also made/assembled in China, is fantastic quality - because the manufacturer chose "good" over "cheap".
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Posting anonymous so my mod points elsewhere don't vanish.
I have to agree with you 100%. This 3P movement seems nice on the outside and it does push for some good policies, but zero immigration is not a good policy. Without immigration, the US population would be on the decline. Not necessarily a [i]bad[/i] thing depending on how you view it, though.
Regardless. Some of the brightest minds in America started outside of our borders. I am completely FOR stopping all [i]illegal[/i] immigration, because it is exactly that: Illegal. Change the rules if you must so that what is being done now isn't illegal, but illegal is illegal. But banning ALL immigration? THAT is idiocy.
I'm also getting really tired with the constant pushing of it here on Slashdot. If the party and the principles were really fantastic and different and new and all that, then this kind of lame get-it-in-wherever-I-can advertising wouldn't be necessary.
This might be taken as being anti-American, but it's not. Really, it's not.
I live in Scotland. My country is a lot older than America, to the extent that my house has trees in the garden that predate the USA. Somewhere round about the time that the Declaration of Independence was being signed, my house was having an extension built on an existing extension on the original house. We're the old guys. And from where I'm sitting, I can see the young guys.
America now looks like a possibly slightly backwards late teenager/early twenties guy, still pedalling around town on his outgrown BMX bike and making "Your Mom" jokes, while all the little kids that were too little for America to play with like India, Pakistan, Iran and China have now grown up a bit and got jobs and cars and girlfriends. And America really desperately wants to play, and throws his not inconsiderable weight around, but really until America grows up and starts acting like a responsible grown-up no-one wants to know.
America has slowly - over the past 20 years or so - made itself utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.