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India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

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Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>s to your second point—no government today is as large in scope as say Rome, the British Empire, the Persian empire, etc. Utter hogwash. In terms of scale and intensiveness if state powers even small nations can easily outstrip the bureaucratic complexity of any ancient empire. The challenges of maintaining a welfare state is no small thing. And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 5…

>And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small. As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propos…

Are you saying that every speaker of an Indo-Aryan language can understand every other speaker of an Indo-Aryan language?

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#242
post #152

Latest update.. DSN did a carrier lock on lander https://twitter.com/dsn_status/status/1170391223040954368 DSS 54 carrier lock on Chandrayaan-2 Lander Frequency: 2.2846GHz Signal strength: -143dBm IDLE OFF 1 TURBO

That singal strength is like barely above photonic noise

I'm guessing it's a false positive from noise amplification instead.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#243

What do we think went wrong? I expect maths to be right but there was a comment somewhere about the regolith with fine particles whose specific composition could have caused unexpected dust clouds as the lander sped to the ground ... how was this tech different from the other 3 successes?

My guess is the attempt at slowing caused it to pitch wildly.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#244
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have? Yes. Still more homogeneous and stable than most other empires...

India is called a sub-continent for a reason. Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc. Definitely more diverse than Australia and probably more diverse than Europe.

>Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc.

I believe you meant ethnicity, not race. Also as for the diversity, the two major ethnicities in India are Indio-Aryan and Dravidian, at 73% and 24% respectively, leaving the rest of the 'massive diversity' spread across 3% of the population. Same holds true for language. So I'd argue that the actual ethnic/language diversity in India is rather small in practice.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#245
post #152

Latest update.. DSN did a carrier lock on lander https://twitter.com/dsn_status/status/1170391223040954368 DSS 54 carrier lock on Chandrayaan-2 Lander Frequency: 2.2846GHz Signal strength: -143dBm IDLE OFF 1 TURBO

I apologize for not reading ALL 500+ Comments (stopped halfway as the politics and history took over). This may have been mentioned.

In some occasions when an event is being broadcast live, a 10-30-60 seconds delay is added to the signal "just in case".

Is there any chance that the Probe crashed on the moon and India's gov/space agency cut the feed while YouTube, live TV, etc. was on this +60 seconds?

I remember when the 3 of SpaceX rockets were doing the concurrent landing (2 at land, 1 at sea), the sea platform link had "a problem" and went down. Then miraculously once the situation was assessed another video surfaced from a nearby camera some time later and we saw that the rocket tilted and fell at sea.

With that said I hope all (peace driven) space exploration efforts go well and we end up with a Star Trek TNG society in 300-400 years.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#246

I have spent many years in India, and I know that the poorest of its people do not support these kinds of financial adventures (or in this case disasters)

Almost no economy in any context, developed, developing, self-reliant, dependent ever has everyone happy with how public funds are spent. It typically falls on the arts, or defence (different opponents) but can hit science and industry funding too.

The belief that the funds were ever going to be targeted to relieving poverty is unjustified. Not unreasonable, and not without some basis in need: The simple observation that the source of funds is not actually tasked with that goal, and the nature of state funding admits that money can (and will) be spent to goals other than those somebody, somewhere wants.

The exception to the rule is "hypothicated" taxes. In Australia, our medibank levy is fully hypothicated to funding public health, and cannot (by law) be used any other way.

TL;DR Indian poverty was never going to be alleviated by the money spent on this project. The money simply wouldn't have been applied to that purpose, had it not been spent on this mission.

second TL;DR The same can be said for any NASA or like activity.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#247

Space is hard. I wish India all success in their next try.

They should try to feed starving people first

One can enable the other: space programs keep top engineers in the country, and this has big network effects that push up the entire economy...

So you end up with more money to feed starving people from! (...not that you'd do that with the $, but anyway).

Like it or not we engineers like to work on interesting problems and don't really give much thought to social issues, so if you want the super smart engineers to meaningfully contribute to a society and economy instead of emigrating or refactoring themselves into oligarchs you need to give them interesting science and technology problems to work on.

Once you have a richer economy, the problem you wanted to solve in the first place gets waaaay easier!

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#248

Space is hard. I wish India all success in their next try.

They should try to feed starving people first

Every country in the world has a lot of issues to fix. If we as humanity had followed this general advice, we'd probably still be sitting in caves, figuring out the perfect cave heating system instead of leaving the cave and exploring.

Harking on humanitarian issues of other countries is awkward for, assuming you are from the US, a country where life expectancy is falling, real income is falling, millions are without health insurance and freedom of press is declining. There is a plethora of other issues touching human dignity and humanitarian topics in the US and yet no one tells them to fix them first before doing X.

Sorry to be blunt, but your comment is ignorant and arrogant.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#250

I have spent many years in India, and I know that the poorest of its people do not support these kinds of financial adventures (or in this case disasters)

Do all homeless people in developed countries support their respective nation's space program?
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