The pride in India right now is as if it won the World Cup.
The interest in the U.S. right now is as if whatever non-U.S. country just won the World Cup.
Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
61–70 of 190 posts
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#62I wish someone would write a headline like: "Why 750 million Indian citizens cannot enjoy basic sanitation facilities after 60 years of gaining so called independence of their nation" Seriously....
Totally different problem, and not at all related. People prefer to go to the bathroom outside in the parts of India with the worst sanitation. It's not about money.
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The broken window fallacy is that of breaking things and repairing/rebuilding them to generate economic activity, i.e., an endless cycle. The OP is arguing that this mission creates new economic assets and activities that expand India's economic base.
In fact it is a similar situation if you believe that the mission itself does not produce sufficient value. The salaries are not merely money being cycled around in the economy if the labor being paid for results in the scientists not having time or inclination to produce other labor. Furthermore, it is likely that the resources launched off of the planet could have been used for something else. Whether or not it is…
I think you're spot on here. And reading `tn13's comment [0], I think it's clear their goal is to produce real, tangible value with their space program. There's an enormous amount of waste in developing an industry, and I would just as soon write off a Mars mission as part of that. (After all, if you want credibility for your satellite launch operations, safely hitting Mars is a pretty good indicator!)
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#64I wish someone would write a headline like: "Why 750 million Indian citizens cannot enjoy basic sanitation facilities after 60 years of gaining so called independence of their nation" Seriously....
They write similar headlines. Sanitation is a problem. However, your comment is off-topic in this conversation and I am, therefore, down-voting it.
Feel free to discuss this in a more relevant thread.
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#65How about reliable electricity and water for your people, then Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Resources_in_India "Water supply and sanitation in India continue to be inadequate ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India "Over 300 million (300 million) people in India have no access to electricity. Of those who do, almost all find electricity supply intermittent and unreliable."
Remind me again how much surplus money did US have to fight wars in Iraq ? Please tell me that US is overflowing with so much money that they have an army stationed in Germany for absolutely no rational reason. Why exactly is US spending so much of higher education when most of the public elementary education is good enough to mass produce kids whose only skill is flipping burgers ? Large nations need to allocate mon…
The fact that the US wastes huge wads of money doesn't exactly convince me that wasting money is a good idea. The US does lots of things that are questionable at best.
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#66How about reliable electricity and water for your people, then Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Resources_in_India "Water supply and sanitation in India continue to be inadequate ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India "Over 300 million (300 million) people in India have no access to electricity. Of those who do, almost all find electricity supply intermittent and unreliable."
On this reasoning, really, all space programmes are unacceptable, and always have been. People are without healthcare in the US; scrap NASA! People are unemployed in Europe; cut funding to the ESA! Zero-sum!
There seems to be a strange idea that spending on space is inherently wasteful. In fact, India spent ~$75m on this, mostly locally, thus providing economic stimulus, and no doubt assisting education.
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#67"They've kept it small. The payload weighs only about 15kg. " Whoa... So basically that whole mission was for 30ish pounds of actual 'useful equipment' in orbit?
NASA's MAVEN payload was just 4.3 times heavier (65kg vs. 15kg) but cost 9.1 times more ($671M vs. 74M). So NASA is still 2.1 times more expensive per kg of useful payload. And costs scale less than linearly with the payload mass, so a bigger Indian mission would have likely been even more than 2.1 times more efficient than NASA...
What makes you think there's a linear relation between payload weight and cost?
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#68How about reliable electricity and water for your people, then Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Resources_in_India "Water supply and sanitation in India continue to be inadequate ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India "Over 300 million (300 million) people in India have no access to electricity. Of those who do, almost all find electricity supply intermittent and unreliable."
Ummmm you like posting links without thinking? Here are a couple of them for you. You see the fallacy in your argument? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Re... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Stat...
Yes, I see a fallacy and it is in your own argument.
The fallacy you are invoking, in fact, has a fancy Latin name; it may be this one:
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#69I hope India and China pull off a Mars Direct style mission and beat the US to Mars. The US needs another "Sputnik Moment" to get itself going in space again. I mean for real, not as an esoteric form of federal "pork."
Yes. And competition at a global scale like that should be good for everyone too.
There might be a bustling future market for organizations in China and India that can sell to the rest of the world that the US won't let domestic companies sell to.
Re: Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling
#70Why do people always pass judgment on spending on things they don't agree with as if the money is destroyed. It's not like they pile all the cash onto the rocket and send it to space. Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India in this process and look at where the money is going. A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domes…
Exactly. Projects like this generate huge amounts of value for a country -- not only because they help to push money around the economy, in terms of salaries and invoices paid to rocket-building companies -- but also in terms of the skills gained by everybody that works on the project, as well as the international capital of being a spacefaring country. Right now, launching satellites in the US is a pain in the ass,…
The shuttle was never primarily used to send Satellites into space... It was used primarily for maned missions.
The Atlas V is the current standard for putting satellites into space.
Sierra Nevada Corporation puts a satellite into orbit almost once a week.
The pain you speak of is non existent.