Slashdot Mirror
India Launches Five Foreign Satellites
vasanth writes: "India has put into orbit five foreign satellites, including one built by France two from Canada and one each from Singapore and Germany. The PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) has so far successfully launched 67 satellites, including 40 foreign ones, into space. The PSLV costs about 17 million USD and the cost is seen as a major advantage India has over other countries in terms of commercial launches. When talking about the cost of the project, the Prime Minister of India noted that the launch was cheaper than Hollywood film Gravity.
When talking about the cost of the project,
They noted an innovative technology stack to launch the satellites. When asked what the major challenges were, Anil Gupta, chief scientist responded that getting the rubber band stretched far enough without breaking was, although common, still very challenging.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
ISRO ( Indian Space Research Organization ) launch vehicles have attained the goals set for them. A politician recently pointed out that cost of sending 5 satellites to space was less than the budget of the movie Gravity ( I liked that movie, he should have picked Avatar for the example IMO ). The Mangalyaan ( Mars Mission ) costs less than â12 per km travelled, making it the most cost effective mars mission ever. These launches were done by the PSLV ( Polar satellite launch vehicle ) and cannot be used for manned launches. ISRO has suffered setbacks , notably with GSLV ( Geostationary satellite launch vehicle ) and in mastering the cryogenic engine. They have made progress and their track record makes them a very good contender to provide a good alternative to SpaceX.
They studied hard and ensured they fully understood every aspect of basic satellite lunch systems domestically before moving to the next stage.
Other nations used military funding, the private sector, other governments and imports to try and boost their own domestic projects.
So many failed as the cash needed never could make up for what India fully understood from the 1960's: its about not getting ahead of your own domestic science.
Now India can enjoy lower cost launch systems without needing any other nations help, costly imports or permission.
"Indian Space Research Organisation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That was true until the GSAT-14 launch. Those guys have talked about their commitment to delivering a better GSLV Mark III, so it'll be awaited.
Technically, it doesn't make too much sense to send a human being as much as it makes to send a robotic creature down there. It's the same reason we use Drones and Surgical Arms. :-)
Perhaps we may require humans on a space station if Robots can't handle certain sensing tasks too well. But that's pretty much the scope of human beings out there. What we could really benefit from is actually better satellite communication and reliable remote assignments with a 5 minute purview.
665 million Indians don't have a private toilet. Way to prioritize, India.
Dead bodies into space, at least it'll cut down on the disease in the coliform bacterial wasteland known as the Ganges - where people bathe and drink because they're told it's sacred.
Incorrect summary, the in progress Mars Mission which at $ 75 Million is cheaper than Gravity movie's budget...
Where do you get your statistics from?
I mean, why would they want to pay for this if they could build rockets themselves... Oh, wait.
Interestingly, India bought defense equipment from the US last year. Who needs financial aid when you can repurpose that money? These Western nations ought to be thankful to get any deals from India.
One wants to know what costs are counted in that total. Is that the raw mfr cost of the launch vehicle? Do they count the cost of the facility, or is that funded out of a different budget? If you compare the purchase price of sn ICBM against the launch cost, theres a big difference.
The only thing more opaque than government funded mission budgets (what's infrastructur, what's mission) is Hollywood accounting.
27 satellites sounds like a lot, especially if you consider that they have to be put in a small corridor to be geostationary.
Or did I miss India building an alternative to GPS?
Nobody would dare to think that some of these satellites are used for spying other countries.
I wonder how accurate that figure is, even Russel Peters jokes about how if you want your taxes done "right" you take it to an Indian book keeper.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Mod parent up !
Unlike other comments in this thread, the parent comment makes the most sense.
Feelings of inadiqucy?
Has the education level of /. readers suddenly sunk to the fucking abyss?
As launches closer to the equator are given a 'free' boost by the rotation of the earth. There was a doomed project called sea launch from sea platforms which sailed to the equator specifically for this purpose. Though granted Europe has Guyana which is even closer.
Nice to see the inconvenient truth being modded Offtopic...
the Prime Minister of India noted that the launch was cheaper than Hollywood film Gravity.
That seems like a wacky comparison to me.
Ok, but maybe Gravity made more money than their launch?
Or, maybe they didn't actually do the launch, but just faked it in a film, like those folks who claim that the Apollo landings were fake films made by Stanley Kubrick in Area 51 . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Well, I guess they actually care about getting things done, instead of posturing before the whole world as "the greatest nation on earth". Actually doing things works a lot better than to rely on past glory.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The world is getting more and more equal all the time. Competition is working!
To be honest, PSLV is cheap in absolute terms, but it's not exactly the pinnacle of payload weight. SpaceX asks for $56M for Falcon 9 v1.1 (as opposed to $15M for a PSLV launch) that can carry about four times as much payload to LEO, which makes Falcon 9 actually a few percent cheaper.
Ezekiel 23:20
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we [the former United States] do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
.
From reading all these comments I see lot of hate against India and Indians. Has /. now becoming like any other politically inclined news / blog.
Seriously, this is because they are manipulating the rupee against the $. This has to stop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The rupee symbol has an HTML representation 8377 or ₹. Even if /. doesn't want to support Unicode, can't it at least support the HTML representations that are there, so that people using that can represent foreign currencies or other symbols?