Nice to know they've got their priorities in the right order.
BTW, how many billions do we send them in foreign aid?
Posted on 08/04/2012 9:40:28 AM PDT by MBT ARJUN
India and China are preparing for two major space missions that could make the world’s two most populated countries major powers in the arena of space exploration.
The world’s largest democracy provided its approval of a mission to the red planet next year, voting in favor of a mission to Mars in October or November 2013.
Four years after successfully launching a moon probe, India announced its plan to embark on another ambitious space effort by sending an orbiter to Mars in November 2013. India will be the sixth space power to undertake such an effort after the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and China, whose maiden attempt last year was unsuccessful.
Read more: http://www.capitolcolumn.com/news/india-joins-china-in-announcing-space-plans-mars-mission-will-launch-in-2013-video/#ixzz22b20DoEV
It's not like we'd be using NASA anymore, since he's bankrupted the country, and it would be another way to weaken his worst enemy, the United States.
It’s because our environazis make us use pine sap as rocket fuel.
(think outside the box)
Someone famous once said, “The poor you will always have with you.”
That doesn’t mean you should refuse to spend any money elsewhere.
The sciences are important. India and China may see space as the high ground. Right now the U. S. doesn’t.
I think our leadership is made up of total idiots. That’s the way it is, Saturday, August 4th, 2012.
Sad, but true...
Perhaps none.When you guys going to learn . India is no Pakistan or any other banana republic. Even Indian govt said the same to UK govt ,that they need no money in aid as they are peanuts .
Don’t know about China ,but US GOV did some serious damage to ISRO progammes by blocking Cryogenic engine tech transfer from Russia.
India's Lofty Ambitions in Space Meet Earthly Realities
By DAVID ROHDE
Published: January 24, 2004
NEW DELHI, Jan. 23— On a recent afternoon, 40 college engineering students, an all-male menagerie of sweaty palms, thick eyeglasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts, emerged from a tour of India's satellite manufacturing plant in the technology boom city of Bangalore. To a man, they burst with ambition, vision and confidence.
All expressed the same hope: to work for India's prestigious national space program. And all dismissed a simple question: why should a country with as many poor as India spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a space program when it could use satellites from Europe or the United States?
‘’We will not depend on others,’’ declared Raj Shecker, 21, an engineering student. ‘’It's just an Indian feeling.’’
Forty years after the launching of a small American-made rocket marked its humble beginnings, India's national space program bills itself as thrifty space exploration for the common man.
With a budget of only $450 million a year — one-thirtieth of NASA’s $15.5 billion annual budget — India has 13 satellites in orbit, produces some of the world's best remote imaging satellites and is planning to send a satellite to the moon by 2007 or 2008.
But unlike space programs in other developing countries, including Brazil, low costs have not meant catastrophic launching failures. Only 6 of India's 37 satellite launchings have failed.
This month the national newsmagazine The Week ran a grandiloquent cover story that captured the country's infatuation with its space program and its self-image as an emerging power.
‘’Every space power is trying to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to colonize the moon,’’ the article declared. ‘’India, too, is racing ahead.’’
Less than a week after China became the third country to put man in space last October, India launched a satellite into orbit and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India a world leader in ‘’applying space technologies to development.’’
In Bangalore, the headquarters of the space effort, offices brim with optimism reminiscent of NASA during its golden age in the 1960’s, as Indian engineers breathlessly describe how they use space technology to improve the lives of tens of millions of average Indians.
Satellites reclaim farmland, they say, bring medical care to remote villages, predict natural disasters and help planners control the country's explosive urban growth.
‘’Our program is entirely oriented toward applications for the national development,’’ said Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian program, formally named the Indian Space Research Organization. ‘’Water management, satellite television, phone links, telemedicine.’’
One of the clearest examples of how the program benefits average Indians is in the village of Majhgawan Karan, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Using satellite imagery, technicians have helped 175 villagers reclaim 40 acres of barren land in an area long haunted by hunger.
Alok Mathur, a project manager at the Remote Sensing Application Center of Uttar Pradesh, said farmland could be reclaimed by simply pouring gypsum on it. He said the gypsum set off a chemical reaction in the soil, which had too much sodium in it. Barren farmland is transformed into rich farmland, and the lives of subsistence farmers are changed.
Mata Prasad, a young Dalit, or untouchable, one of India's outcastes, stood beside his tiny but verdant one-acre plot of wheat and rice. He was pleased. For years the land was barren, he said, and his family's primary concern was getting enough to eat. Not any more.
‘’Earlier, I used to worry about food,’’ Mr. Prasad said. ‘’Now I worry about the education of my children.’’
Forty miles to the northeast lies another example of the space program's benefits. Doctors in the basement of the main public hospital in the city of Lucknow, the state capital, chatted over a live satellite link with doctors in rural hospitals hundreds of miles away.
Dr. S. K. Mishra proudly explained how he and his staff examine dozens of patients a day in remote corners of India via satellite. Color monitors allow face-to-face conversations with patients. Test results, X-rays and echocardiograms from the rural hospitals are all transmitted instantly to Lucknow.
But even these showcase projects have their limitations. Space officials estimate that the farming project has helped 500,000 farmers reclaim 667,000 acres of farmland in 3,100 villages. In Uttar Pradesh, a state of 160 million people, that is a drop in the bucket.
Doctors said that being able to offer a diagnosis by satellite had helped tens of thousands of people. But they conceded that it would be far too expensive to equip India's hundreds of thousands of rural hospitals with satellite dishes. They predicted that in the end, cheap Internet access in rural areas, not expensive satellites, would revolutionize communications between hospitals.
‘’For technology to be used by everyone it has to be cost-effective,’’ said one doctor. ‘’Not every small hospital can have a satellite.’’
The euphoria over the space program is by no means universal.
In the last five years, Indian rockets have successfully launched two German, one South Korean and one Belgian satellite in orbit. But with the commercial space market flooded with heavy lift rockets from the United States, Europe and particularly Russia, the Indian program, whose rockets remain smaller, has not attracted droves of customers and has not proved the moneymaker originally promised.
And privately, Indian officials concede that they remain dependent on foreign components. While India's satellites are assembled in India, a majority of electronic components for India's satellites continue to come from the United States, Europe and elsewhere, they said.
Some Indian space analysts say the moon probe, which is expected to cost $84 million, is the first sign that the space program is moving away from its practical roots and becoming politicized. Reports in recent months of plans for expensive manned missions have only deepened concern.
Despite an economy that is expected to grow by 8 percent this year, India is home to the world's largest concentration of poor. Three hundred million of India's one billion people live in poverty.
Gopal Raj, a journalist and the author of a history of the Indian space program, ‘’Reach for the Stars,’’ questioned the scientific value of the moon probe. The satellite will spend two years making a three-dimensional map of the moon's surface and surveying its soil for minerals.
‘’Frankly, I think this has more to do with prestige than anything,’’ Mr. Raj said. ‘’I am not convinced about anything else.’’
American space experts warn of problems as well. They accuse Indian managers of not spending the money they should on projects and leaving unnecessary debris in space.
There are also questions about whether India is planning to mount a military effort in space. After China launched a man into orbit last fall, the head of the Indian Air Force was quoted as saying that India was developing space-based weapons. Within days the country's civilian leaders forced him to retract the statement.
For many years, in fact, the United States viewed the Indian program as a proliferation and security risk, despite its civilian oversight. Remote sensing satellites that can track erosion and crop yields can also act as spy satellites.
Indians vehemently deny the charge, but American analysts say rocket technology produced by the civilian space program, as well as some of its top engineers, have ended up in the military’s ballistic missile program. They include even the country's president, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.
‘’A space program and a missile program tend to go hand in hand,’’ Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said in a telephone interview. ‘’The technologies are the same. A rocket is a rocket is a rocket.’’
Those concerns appear to have eased of late. In early January the Bush administration announced that it would lift a ban on the export of some civilian space technology to India. Indian space officials said they did not know exactly what bans would be lifted and did not know the full significance of the move.
As a result of the sanctions, and an urge for independence after 300 years of British colonial rule, Indian space officials have furiously worked to make sure their program does not rely on foreign technology. In many ways they have succeeded.
In 1992 the United States pressed Russia not to give India the technology for a cryogenic rocket. Two weeks ago, on Jan. 10, Indian engineers announced that they had successfully tested an Indian-built cryogenic engine.
Pride in that kind of independence and initiative is shared by many, including the prospective young engineers who visited the satellite plant. ‘’It's a benefit for ourselves,’’ said Srinath Hanaji, a 21-year-old engineering student. ‘’We will not depend on others.’’
This is the last of three articles on the expanding space race in the developing world. Earlier articles examined China's rising challenge to the United States and a setback for Brazil.
Photos: A woman and child tend to crops in a field in Majhgawan Karan.; Operators at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow looked at X-rays transmitted there by satellite.; Satellite images helped Dharam Raj, left, and his family reclaim land in the village of Majhgawan Karan that had been barren because of salty soil.
As I have stated in other threads on foreign aid, not a dime. Every single cent of foreign aid goes to the cronies of Dick Lugar and John Kerry or some other politician. No so-called recipient nation ever sees real money. Recipient nations resist aid while Senators here force "aid" upon them. That behavior alone should reveal a lot about how aid programs work. Other countries are merely excuses for crony-capitalists and so-called non-profit groups feeding off taxpayer dollars.
Wot?
China: "Between 1981 and 2005, the proportion of China's population living on less than $0.01/day is estimated to have fallen from 85% to 15%, meaning that roughly 600 million people were taken out of poverty. The number of people living on less than $2/day is approximately 468 million, or 36% of the population, according to 2009 estimates." Note: 15% of China's 1.3 billion is 195,000,000 people;
India: "In 2011, World Bank states, 32.7% of the total Indian people falls below the international poverty line of US$ 1.25 per day (PPP) while 51.7% live on less than US$ 2 per day . . . ."
Comparing America's "poor" to those numbers is plain stupid. Yes, we had a space program while the poor went without 72" HD TVs. . . .
(Note: the quotes are from wiki-grafitti which are probably at this moment being expunged by persons unknown.)
YES! It is their business.. BUT! it is our business how much economic assistance we Americans must send to help their poor -- whether it be cash or trade preferences.
Thank you James. That was a good article. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.
It touched on a number of points, I found interesting. One of them follows:
India is a natural counterbalance to China. We probably need to view it’s space program in that light. China is a threat to India. I can’t see any reason for India not to develop resources to protect itself, even if by means of it’s own MAD type program.
They’d BETTER include muslims in this so they don’t feel left out. NASA can’t do all of that work alone...
"People's Republic of China (PRC)
"The People's Republic of China began making significant inroads with its lobbyists in the 1990s. By that decade, the PRC lobbyists finally had enough financial resources to be on a level with, or even out-compete, the ROC lobbyists in donating to members of Congress. Furthermore, the PRC lobbyists were also helped by the transition between KMT and DPP lobbyists.
"Since the 1990s, the PRC lobbyists have had two primary goals: first, the prevention of any further recognition of the ROC government by the American government, and second, the promotion of American policies favorable to the economic development of the PRC." [my emphasis]
India goes well beyond mere lobbyists to promote their national affairs.. they have caucuses with scores of our? senators and representatives as members ostensibly representing Indian-Americans.
Yes India -- with our help -- must stand up to both Pakistan and China.. do they really need to spend precious resources to go to Mars? I thought at first that this was a joint mission with Red China and maybe that might help cool things.
My point with this reply is that India and China as well as scores of other countries have 100 Senators and 435 representatives to serve them in Congress. We Americans have exactly two senators and one representative.
bttt
The VERY complicated landing of the Mars rover “Curiosity” happens tomorrow - Aug. 5th.
Well as I said Indian Govt refused to take any kind of aid .But you guys always push via NGO ,to get some trade balance or Investment favour.
Are you handling the Live Thread of the landing?
Thanks MBT ARJUN.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.