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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"
But I am not doubting the intent. In fact, it is refreshing to see a nation not simply looking at short term but thinking in terms of long term goals but in a concrete way. Its a great thing to have the community of nations dedicated to space exploration expanding in any case.
ACK
The US will be able to outsource space exploration overseas!!! Oh goody.
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
The more alternatives for manned space flight, the less dependent we become on the space agency of one single nation. An agency that battles not only technical difficulties but also perpetual budget problems.
I hope for more international cooperation in the future. Sending up your own astronauts gets your country a fair bit of prestige. Sending up astronauts from other nations also gets you friends.
easy - punjabinauts
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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?
Well, India is an economy that needs access to space. There's no question of that. Between communication and remote sensing, space is critical to India's long term economic development -- and lifting people out of poverty.
The question is whether it is a good investment, when they can rely on the US and Europe -- at least for non-manned access to space. There is is India's tradition of non-alignment to consider. It is attractive not to be dependent on great powers for something so important. Also, expecting an investment in space to pay off in the short term is unreasonable. Twenty years off India might well become a dominant player in the commercialization of space.
But why manned? If people were computers, it would make no sense. But we're not. We have these irrational emotions that have to be played to get the most out of us. There is something exciting about joining the club of "spacefaring nations", more exciting than putting clever little robots in space. I can see Japanese getting inspired by that, but Japanese engineers are an unique breed I think. Once I saw a Japanese engineer give a presentation about the fuzzy logic algorithm he'd used to control the agitator in a washing machine. We're talking that thing that sticks up in the middle of the washing machine and swishes back and forth. It only has one freaking degree of freedom, and this guy was waxing so poetic about it that he was moved to the brink of tears.
Right then and there I resolved never to invest in an American company that made washing machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You joke, but this is a strong sign of world leadership in science and engineering moving to India. Of course, it's easy to talk about a space program, and the US may return to funding space exploration with the next president (or even the next congresss), but still - it's a powerful sign. Troublesome or hope-inspiring depending on where you live, I guess, but I'm thrilled to see any country showing some vision.
Sadly, putting a man in orbit is more of a statement of a nation's abilities to land a warhead anywhere it chooses than necessarily it's commitment to space exploration, but I'll take what I can get!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
To safeguard our identity and culture, and to maintain the very existence of our nation, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration......To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands.
Emphasis mine. So, while I may agree with the A3P position regarding space and fiscal responsibility, it appears that this party wants to take an isolationist attitude regarding the American culture. Never mind the fact that some of the greatest minds in America were immigrants. Nevermind the fact that Werner Von Braun was a German born rocket scientist, turned American immigrant, turned leader of the Saturn V program that got our boys to the moon. Never mind the fact that jazz, one of our greatest cultural movements in America, was started by immigrants. Nevermind the fact that Einstein, one of the best known scientists in the world, that contributed significantly to our nuclear supremacy was also a foreign born immigrant. Nevermind all those pesky historical facts that show, time and again, that legal immigration both enriches and strengthens America as a nation. Nah, forget all that, A3P is going to put a ban on ALL immigration. What's more? They are going to start paying legal immigrants to return to their own country. Goodbye knowledgeable Indian, Japanese, and Chinese scientists, programmers, engineers, and technicians. Goodbye Mexican immigrants that provide California with one of its most delicious and plentiful types of food. In fact, goodbye all non-native American people as you, in fact, have descended from immigrants yourself. We real Americans don't need you here.....
Oh wait...
So no, sorry, I am not going to give any credence to a political party that proudly declares white nationalism as one of its creeds and mission goals. The hypocrisy evident in the quote above with regards to immigration and the historical contribution immigrants have made to American technical progress is as thick as it is nauseating. Take your political astroturfing somewhere. I, for one, would rather spend my vote writing in a candidate with absolutely no chance at election (and thus adding one more vote to the count that reduces a possible majority of ANY party) than support that kind of bullshit that A3P is peddling.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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.
I prefer to remain a part of the unwhooshed masses.
When looking at the growth rates of developing countries, please keep in mind the raw numbers we're talking about here. For example, in an economy with a GDP of, say, $1 billion, a $100 million project would grow the economy by 10%, while the same project would only grow an economy with a GDP of $10 billion by 1%. A $100 million gain in a $1 billion economy isn't magically more valuable than a $200 million gain in a $10 billion economy because a 10% gain is bigger than a 2% gain, nor does that gain get the smaller economy any closer to the value of the larger economy. To help illustrate this, using 2008 GDP figures, India's 7.3% gain in 2008 corresponds to a roughly $880 million gain in their economy. By comparison, the same $880 million gain would only account for a 0.6% gain in the US economy, which isn't that far off from the 0.4% gain that the US actually reported in 2008.
Percentage gains in GDP are certainly important, of course, and are very helpful when talking about economies of similar sizes. However, when one economy is over an order of magnitude bigger than another economy (the US' economy is more than 10x larger than the Indian economy, even with the latest economic contractions), the percentages really don't tell the whole story. In terms of nominal dollar amounts, emerging economies aren't really growing that much faster than the US.
Last but not least, I'll point out that claiming that all Americans are ignorant is just as stale and tasteless as claiming that all Indians work at call centers or convenience stores. Just because some non-Americans have some exposure to some of the ignorant politicians and entertainers in the US, they have extrapolated it into this whole stereotype for an entire hemisphere. I guess that's just ignorance.
Nations like India suffer from significant brain drain. Majority of people skilled and motivated enough are either preoccupied with immigrating to greener pastures if they haven't done so already.
What is left behind is a a workforce skewed towards young, inexperienced people, largely emitted from the burgeoning 6 month short courser industry.
There is definitely a substantial difference in software quality that correlates based on the nation where the software house is based (but doesn't correlate to the nationalities of the staff in that house).
Cultural considerations also weigh in. Indian professional culture takes politics and hierarchies to a whole new level. As a straight talking engineer, trying to fit into the professional culture in India is exceedingly frustrating to say the least. Most business operations do not plan ahead at all - and are only interested in taking the next immediate step and doing it at absolute minimum cost (time and money). And when it all falls in a heap - they all just pick up the phone and yell at one another until the poor blokes at the bottom of the pile end up working for about 3 days straight without sleep a duct tape an interim solution that always becomes the semi permanent solution. Few weeks later - rinse and repeat. Hardly a professional environment that is conductive for quality engineering.
I've done alot of work for state run telecommunications company over there. That the state run space agency is having so much success completely baffles me. Maybe there are actually good state institutions in India after all.
people like you sit back on the Apollo moon landing's laurels and fiddle while Rome burns
??? Mars missions? GPS? Comm satellites? Space Shuttle? ISS? Apollo was a military exercise, in spite of its trappings as a peace mission. The US would and could put a Starbucks on Pluto if it was in its immediate national interest. The same cannot be said of either India or China. They are just now reverse engineering US (and Russian) technology to do things done with room-size computers 50 years ago. Where do you think India and China got their rocket/computing/communications technology in the first place? And what's burning exactly? Also...
What's the USA doing? Still putting out fires in Mesopotamia
First, I remind you that both India and China have benefited enormously from the energy excesses of the US and Europe during the 20th century. There would be no US market for Chinese/Indian goods/services without the West's exploitation of the Middle East. In fact, the reluctance of both nations to sign on to any binding climate resolutions is based mainly on the argument that they should be allowed