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India To Launch First Manned Space Mission By 2022 (hindustantimes.com)
India will launch its first manned space mission by 2022, the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday, which could make it the fourth nation to do so after the United States, Russia and China. From a report: Modi congratulated Indian scientists for excelling in their research and are at the forefront of innovation. "Our scientists have made us proud. They launched over 100 satellites... They successfully completed the Mars mission." ISRO, India's space agency, successfully launched 104 satellites on 15 February 2017, of which three were Indian while the rest were foreign commercial satellites. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan, India's first interplanetary mission was launched on November 5, 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It has been orbiting Mars since September 24, 2014.
Impressive, but where are they planning on going? Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it's cold as hell.
says they don't
they can't touch Russia and China at this point, but they might be able to thwart India. They've never like India, and they've kept a subtly hostile rhetoric against them since Kissinger's days, and they simply do not want another competitor up there.
Keep a lid on the operations as much as possible. Encrypt everything, require digital signatures on critical mission control commands, and so on. If it's possible to subvert or sabotage, assume that someone (most likely America) will try.
I'm sorry but doesn't India have much more urgent things to take care of such as public sanitation and other totally neglected parts of Indian society rather than space exploration.
I'm sorry but doesn't America have much more urgent things to take care of such as universal health care and drinkable public water in Flint rather than space exploration (sorry, I mean "Space Force").
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"My name is Mike and I'm here to space you very much!"
>Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it's cold as hell.
And theres no one there to raise them, if you did
What year will the entire country have clean drinking water and electricity? Seems like that should be on the priority list.
Is less important.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Has no one ever dealt with the Indian government before? There's way too much corruption to make this a realistic goal by 2022. Will they eventually get into space? Sure, but it's going to take longer then four years. It will take that long just to grease the proper palms to get the paperwork approved much less build anything.
I'm kinda wondering, considering how Indian cars and trucks are made, if wood will be one of the construction materials in their space vehicles?
They are working on both. And their space budget is a tiny fraction of the budget for rural development.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Lets make sure all nations reaching for the heavens among the gods implement at least interoperable docking systems, air-locks and maybe even space suits and their support systems in the future.
shortsighted
Everyone always has "more pressing things" to deal with. Always. And it doesn't matter.
This is the fallacy of, "we could redirect that money to Worthwhile Cause X". Except, even if you did stop the space exploration, the money usually won't get redirected to Worthwhile Cause X.
Here's the issue. Space exploration is a strategic issue. One that will pay off (or not, but it probably will pay off) in decades to centuries. Strategic issues can always be put on the back burner to deal with tactical issues. As long as you don't do so for decades to centuries, you probably won't even pay a big price for doing so. However if you NEVER invest in strategic development, it will become your biggest problem in the fullness of time.
Really, do you think that the King and Queen of Spain didn't have "more pressing matters" than funding Columbus? Of course they did. And we should be grateful that instead of being single issue rulers, or tactically obsessed monarchs, they decided to fund Columbus.
One has to ask, what is the opportunity cost of not funding space exploration? And it's also fair to ask, what is the opportunity cost of not funding universal health care? Governing is exactly about making decisions like this.
But in the real world, if you de-fund NASA, you don't automatically get universal health care. If fact you typically get either more government corruption, or a Space Force, or a crony-driven tax cut that benefits the 1% with 99% of the tax cut money.
Seriously.
Many early capsules had no toilets, nor facilities for dealing with urine. More recent ones have a hose for piping urine offboard and a bag for feces though. The cost and expense of a toilet are usually reserved for long duration flights, which manned capsules usually don't do.
I hope they succeed, I'm always happy to see progress in space technology.
Unless the US gets its act together, we will need other countries to launch our astronauts. India sounds like a better bet than Russia or China. I'd love to see us get our own launch capability back, but its been a while. (Yes, I know the various efforts under way but I'm still waiting to see it actually happen).
"United States, Russia and China"
Pretty sure that should be
Russia, United States and China
I believe most of their launchers use hypergolics, which are none to fun to fuel or deal with if there are issues. Most of their launches are also on fairly small rockets (~3,500kg) which aren't generally suitable for manned missions (~14,000kg for Falcon 9 in reusable mode). I'm sure it's doable on some of their larger rockets, but those rockets (GSLV) don't have much of a flight record (7 launches total over near a decade).