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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).

Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi...

they are all "management looking".

You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia.

We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

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>>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

Oh yes we are.

But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack.

Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder.

The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India.

I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services.

Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.

You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more).

Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it.

[0]: /s

I realize that ISRO's accomplishments are nowhere near NASA's or ESA's but to call ISRO's efforts 'jugaad' is a serious insult to the efforts and intelligence of thousands of people involved in getting a rocket to Mars.

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