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

wsj.com

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

#251

Post by thewhitetulip »

nithinm wrote: post #21
thewhitetulip wrote: post #5

I read that the maximum experiments are in the orbiter so this is a successful mission. The only thing for which it 'failed' was to let the ruling class do chest thumping by saying 'we are the fourth country to land a rover'. The ruling party had planned a great celebration today for it's 100 days in office, a date coinciding when the rover would land! They wanted to milk it for their nationalistic purposes while the…

I think you are unnecessarily making this political. Even if India was successful at landing i dont think the government would count it as 'their' achievement rather would be counted as an achievement of the whole nation. And even 'non-blind' followers would celebrate, given how everyone were on edge of their seats yesterday. Also no one is bashing Nehru because he started ISRO. Calling the moon landing a government…

> Also no one is bashing Nehru because he started ISRO

Respectfully, you are not right. Just go down this thread and you'll find one comment which says "Just because Nehru did one thing right doesn't absolve his wrongs"

There has been a coordinated attempt to distort history and malign Nehru. Not claiming that he did not screw up, he did. But he doesn't get credit due to the misinformation campaign

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

#252

Post by thewhitetulip »

nithinm wrote: post #90
missosoup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you are unnecessarily making this political GP is just highlighting that India's ruling party made this unnecessarily political. I'm not sure why it's being downvoted when it's factually accurate and is interesting in the context of the discussion. This is exactly the same thing that was going on in the Soviet Union where space project schedules were dictated by key party dates and celebrations. Not sure if…

The assumption GP made is that government deliberately planned their 100 days in office and the moon landing date to coincide. But the actual date of mission was different and was posponded last minute(literally) because of a leakage. So if the ruling party (ruling for past 5 years) really wanted the dates to coincide they would have easily scheduled the initial date to coincide. So there is no 'factual' correctness…

He has not ruled "since 5yrs"

His second term just started in May

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

#253

Post by powerapple »

nikhil5 wrote: post #237

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)

I think the world is going to be a terrible place if we have poor people to lead the country. I do not hate poor people, but being poor will put you in a very bad position, can lead you with no vision, just short-term thinking of basic needs. It is very sad.

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

#254

Post by BurningCycles »

hollerith wrote: post #241
BurningCycles wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

My understanding is that yes, to a very large extent, since they are dialects of the same language foundation, which is sanskrit and later prakrit.

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

#255

Post by FraKtus »

ryloric wrote: post #25
dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

But the goals are different though, ISRO is less about grand exploratory projects and more about doing the little things and balance them with the commercial aspects of space. India is not a super rich country that can spare ISRO a large budget you know. Eitherway, there's also some advantages from having competing organizations with different operating philosophies exploring space.

Exactly, I find it impressive what they did achieve within their budget. It's opening ways to create more affordable space missions.

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

#256

Post by tozeur »

dang wrote: post #136
tozeur wrote: post #120

Yay India’s great at trashing even the moon

Nationalistic flamebait will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this to HN. Edit: it looks like you've been posting quite a few unsubstantive comments to HN generally. Could you please not? We're trying for a bit better quality level than internet default here.

My apologies, I didn’t mean to dilute the quality of HN. I’ll state my comment in a less “flamebait” manner next time.

But you can’t deny that the Tragedy of the Commons can now be applied to the moon...

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

#257

Post by philwelch »

dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

There’s value in any organization independently working out for itself how to land a probe on the moon. Multinational efforts like ISS are great but it’s often useful to have redundancy. If Roscosmos loses funding or there’s some catastrophe preventing them from launching Soyuz from Baikonur, I think it’s good for humanity that China can still launch their Shenzhou and America (hopefully soon) can still launch our Dragon or Starliner. Besides, as long as we still have national sentiment, I think it’s wonderful for an Indian or Chinese child to be able to have the same feelings of inspiration that American and Russian children have grown up with.

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

#258

Post by philwelch »

lenkite wrote: post #13
dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

In a world under one uniform system of tightly-integrated government or closely allied nations at the nearly the same economic and technological levels, one can certainly do this. Otherwise, yes, you are right, it's a grand pipe dream. Will all the nations contribute equally in terms of technological, financial and expert human resources ? Besides, tribal, nationalistic thinking is very good for competition and speed…

SpaceX itself exists in part as a competitor to Roscosmos.

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

#259

Post by happy-go-lucky »

Latest update... looks like they've found the location of the lander on the lunar surface, the orbiter has clicked a thermal image of the lander, and they're trying to establish a contact with it.

Don't know how reliable this source is:

https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1170610654232731648

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