Friday, January 12, 2007

cannot but put a negative twist !

SF Chronicle on India's space program and the recent launch

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/11/MNGLMNGFEQ1.DTL

( by the way, what on earth is a .dtl extension ?!)

India's space agency launched a rocket Wednesday that represented two significant firsts for the country's fledgling space program -- the first multisatellite launch and the first attempt to retrieve a rocket from orbit around Earth.

In between all the praises, they HAVE to put the negative spin ..

Although developing a space program infrastructure within India may not have obvious connection to the country's development -- one-third of India still lives on less than $1 a day -- it is bringing India together with the United States and the European Space Agency, cooperating on a lunar orbiter planned for 2008.

Oh yeah, if the Brits had not looted us for their "Industrial revolution", we wud have been still one of the richest countries in the world... and shouldn't you see the other side of it - that you can still live in India at less that a $1 a day.. hey we even run schools for just a dollar a day
( courtesy, the 20,000+ ekalvidyalayas - http://www.ekal.org ) .. our railways transports numbers over half the population of australia EVERYDAY , our kumbhmelas have numbers comparable to the population of Canada, assembling in ONE town, and there no major problems, no major epidemic breakout .....

Perhaps unlnowingly, SFC has a nice comparison in the last para, of the country which has learned to live (and let live) with the minimum, and the other,... oh well

Despite limited resources -- India's space agency has an annual budget of $850 million, compared with $16.4 billion for NASA -- India has become a global leader in orbiting communications, remote sensing and meteorological satellites

3 comments:

froginthewell said...

Can't this poverty argument be applied to America? I mean, certainly there is poverty in US, there are "n" ( millions ) people without medical insurance - a country which has so many billions to spend should certainly be able to take care of that.

Anonymous said...

Hi

POSITIVELY it will contribute towards poverty reduction.

See...space launches and services is a lucrative international market of the elite few developed nations.

Success of Indian space programme shall garner more share. Using Indian services at a much much competitive prices (yet successful) will be the prudent option for other developing and under-developed nations

Expect more revenues in another 2 decades

This is the reason, why US tried to stall selling of cryogenic engine technology to India and even supercomputers

But nobody can stop a resurgent India, whose time has come

Anonymous said...

I thought the article was criticizing the wasteful, inefficient and often incompetent NASA - perhaps NASA should outsource its projects to ISRO?