India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
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India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
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Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#2On one hand, this could be really encouraging, allowing India to increase its home-grown engineering capacity.
On the other hand, "international cooperation" is often the death of many projects, particularly space projects.
On the other other hand, it wasn't like NASA was about to do something huge and cooperation with India puts that goal at risk.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#3Why could they not have agreed to cooperate before NASA spent $650M on the Maven program which does the exact same thing that ISRO's $74M Mangalyaan does?
I demand a refund.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#4I would consider technical collaboration in this space (pardon the pun) to generally be a great thing. Missions to Mars have historically been very difficult:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
Hopefully, this kind of partnership doesn't get weighed down too heavily by the intricacies of international politics.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#5IF this works, this will surely accelerate the process of sending humans to other planets (may be not Mars)
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#6Why could they not have agreed to cooperate before NASA spent $650M on the Maven program which does the exact same thing that ISRO's $74M Mangalyaan does? I demand a refund.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#7While I'm a big supporter of international co-operation, remember that the US has been striking a number of technical deals with India, as a part of a long-term political investment in bringing up a large democratic power to balance China. I think this has as much to do with that goal as it does with sharing technical information.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#8On one hand, this could be really encouraging, allowing India to increase its home-grown engineering capacity. On the other hand, "international cooperation" is often the death of many projects, particularly space projects. On the other other hand, it wasn't like NASA was about to do something huge and cooperation with India puts that goal at risk.
> On the other hand, "international cooperation" is often the death of many projects, particularly space projects.
There are plenty of counter-examples. The ISS is an effort that spans the US, Canada, Japan, Russia and Europe (ESA). Hubble is NASA-ESA.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#9I was really hoping India's Mars probe would mean that the public in general would finally have a new independent source of information and data.
However this is great news and I'm sure the joint effort will speed up the tough task of uncovering the planet's secrets.
Re: India, U.S. Agree to Joint Exploration of Mars
#10While I'm a big supporter of international co-operation, remember that the US has been striking a number of technical deals with India, as a part of a long-term political investment in bringing up a large democratic power to balance China. I think this has as much to do with that goal as it does with sharing technical information.
I have a dumb question. What's a large democratic power, and how does it differ from China? I'm not implying China is in any way democratic, but rather inviting someone to further explain what the goal of the US is.
Is it likely that this is simply empire expansion rather than an altruistic goal of balancing China? Mainly I'm just wondering what the concerns might be if a large democratic power (and I'd still like to know what exactly that is, and how it differs from other modern powers) isn't brought up in the region.
Forgive my ignorance. I probably should have taught myself these things long ago rather than invested all of my time in programming and other pursuits.
Also, just to clarify, I am aware of the textbook definition of "democracy," "republic," etc, but it seems like those names are more of a flag for people to fight under than a definition for a state of being in the modern era. So I'm quite curious to understand the issues at play here.