Posted on 11/05/2013 2:58:56 AM PST by the scotsman
'India has successfully launched a spacecraft to the Red Planet - with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to reach Mars.
The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country's east coast.
The head of India's space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to reach Mars orbit and carry out experiments.
The spacecraft is set to travel for 300 days and reaching Mars orbit in 2014.
If the satellite orbits the Red Planet, India's space agency will become the fourth in the world after those of the US, Russia and Europe to undertake a successful Mars mission.'
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Commercial exploitation of space is another thing that sounds good until you look at the balance sheet. There are two things that make it extremely unlikely to be successful:
I'll get into the total lack of feasibility of humanity's survival any place other than earth some other time.
LOL too true.
Yeah, integrated circuits have not been cost effective. Absolutely.
Nice to know that they’ll already be a 7-11 on Mars when we get there.
Yep, right after you explain the total lack of feasibility of manned flight, satellite video, net teleconferencing, genetic manipulation, Shakespeare and Beethoven.
Seeya then, sport.
And we can't even get good telemetry.
Did it ever occur to you just how profoundly and monumentally stupid your false analogy is “sport?”
And the best part is you probably think you’re being clever.
-——We need a healer, not a destroyer.——
I would argue we need a leader. A leader taking us forward into presently unknown new prosperity will cause healing to naturally take place.
You are remarkably under informed about the many developments that space R&D has given us. Half the diagnostic equipment in a modern hospital has its roots in Aerospace Medical Research. If you can keep a man alive on the moon you can keep him alive in a lot of situations. The benefit of going to Mars is not what we find there. It is the development of the technological means to GET there. From a purely economic stand point it makes more sense to go to and asteroid and mine it. There have been studies that show that could easily pay for itself...
You have to stop and use your head about where all that money goes. We don’t just pile it up into a stair way to heaven. They PAY that money to tens of thousands of engineers, technicians, and scientists to build new and amazing things. The money does not vanish, it goes right back into the economy as those people spend their pay. Also, preeminence is space does the same thing as a strong military. Who will attack us when they know we are over their heads all the time, even in unarmed spacecraft. Intimidation pays off. Who will take the US seriously when Chinese and Indians are walking around on Mars and we are just spending more and more on the welfare class?
Of course I for one prefer anything that IS worth doing in space is worth doing via private funding. But that does not mean there is no useful government reason to invest in space.
I can see you've fully drunk the NASA Koolaid. You have a remarkable lack of understanding of what really goes on in R&D if you think that we wouldn't have those innovations without the space program. I refer you to Bastiat's That which is seen and that which is not seen As a starting place to open your eyes to the wastefulness of GOVERNMENT sponsored research.
We wouldn’t have them because many of the benefits have been ‘spin-offs’. Those are things that you discover when you were trying to do something else. Aerospace and Military research has all sorts of spinoffs. But that is irreverent because you totally missed my point when you decided I was somehow defending the ‘wasteful government research’.
Why don’t you spend all this bluster and effort attacking the parts of the government that are 100% useless and cut the ones that are 50% useless last. Go cut the ones that employ thousands of bureaucrats and paper pushers and save the ones that employ thousands of engineers for when there is nothing left to cut.
You still don't get it. All research has spin-offs. Getting something done by government is the most wasteful and inefficient way to do anything. If the same budget that's spent on NASA were allocated by the marketplace you would get more in terms of innovation because you wouldn't have to work on things like large rocket engines which have absolutely no other use that powering rockets. And we've exhaustively proven that Mars consists of rocks and dirt. Something that anyone with a college degree in chemistry could have determined. NASA is just welfare and government dependency for engineers and scientists. BTW did you read Bastiat?
You forgot neener neener.
Never forget neener neener.
So many people, so much cleverness - I’m underwhelmed.
I have a feeling you are neither an engineer, a scientist or a highly skilled technologist. Tell me I am wrong. For those of us who have worked in these fields, the space program has yielded scientific breakthroughs which could never have been achieved otherwise.
I would rather have tax payer money spent on advancing technology than more food stamps for a population whose biggest health problem is obesity.
Lot of Indians whom you see driving around here were unable to withstand the rigorous competition for education and jobs in India, with the type of people manning India’s space program.
Why does every space effort have to equal “entire country”? Why can’t a private firm launch something? From mid ocean if necessary, should no country grant it flight privileges?
Yeah, and the manager will turn out to be an ancient white guy with a bad hair transplant job.
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