India is sending a rover to the moon, and the country is pumped
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/chandrayaan-2-mee...
If developing countries spend a miniscule of their budget ( ISRO budget less than 2%), there is cynicism. I think what India is doing is great and is great for improving India's technical abilities and India doesn't need to answer what it chooses to do with its money.
That's not true. Public opinion about the moon missions was divided throughout the whole program, and a lot of effort was spent debating it. It is only in retrospect that it seems like a no-brainer, because everyone who was against it has been forgotten and we know it was a success.
Also, frankly, that's a question for Indians to debate and not a big fan of NY times casually questioning the judgement of that spending without giving it an elaborate treatment. I have seen this multiple times. India launched Mars craft, but there is poverty. India launches 100+ satellites in one mission, but there is poverty. Its irrelevant at that instant and seems only to diminish India's aspirations.
May be some of this journalists can take a look at Indian Budget, study it deeply, and find where the government can spend more wisely. I bet they will find more wasteful spending than the investment in ISRO and that may be helpful for the public to know.
Yes.
There was considerable energy spent questioning it and the project was almost scrapped numerous times. It also never had the support of the majority of Americans at any point until the actual launch itself:
https://www.academia.edu/179045/_Public_Opinion_Polls_and_Pe...
Well, more energy should have been spent in that line of questioning.
But there was nationalism at play, and the race to compete with the USSR.
So, not really the best counter-example...
But there was nationalism at play,
and the race to compete with the USSR.
India lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and protecting its citizens is by far the #1 priority of its government. The space program will always be well funded as a result.
If a country acquires deep technical know-how on engineering, it means the country can use it to spin out new industries and export that utility. That is how a country makes money.
After world war II, Germany didn't give away all the remaining money to war survivors. They built rock-solid airplane engines and cars, which in turn improved the economy overall.
No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.
Hell, you hardly even hear people say that about other, dubiously cost-effective science projects like the LHC.
Experimental space flight is coming directly from tax payers and public funding. I still think it’s a worthy use of public funds because we get so much out of it that is intangible while supporting both scientific research and some of the most advanced R&D work on the planet (which is fed back into the economy in many ways).
But I still think it’s healthy for people to question it when their local day-to-day problems seem so much bigger than the universes, which is abstract and studied by academics and advanced private industry who aren’t their working class neighbours. Which is a big reason why we have elected officials to make balanced policy.
So, you don’t know about all the subsidies for stadiums, etc?
https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/30/news/companies/nfl-taxpayer...
Oh the irony.
Indian is giving tax, tax is getting spent on space flight, the said Indian is getting pumped.
Finger wagging by NYTimes.
That one is said constantly (at least in the US). It comes up as a matter of routine as it pertains to the extremely high salaries that professional athletes get paid and with regard to the construction of new stadiums (which often cost a billion dollars or more now, are frequently taxpayer subsidized, and are often replacing functional 30 year old stadiums).
The top 500 NBA, NFL and MLB players earn more in salary than the CEOs of the S&P 500. The MLB payroll is $4 billion for ~750 players. Just the top 30 players in the NBA are earning one billion dollars per year combined. NBA teams are spending near $4 billion per year on salaries for ~450 players, or around $8 to $9 million per player. The 32 NFL teams are spending nearly $6 billion per year.
Between the NBA, NFL and MLB, there is around $13 to $14 billion in salaries.
But I'm willing to bet that if SpaceX or whoever ever do become fully self-sustaining, a large proportion of people will continue to view space technology as frivolous and unnecessary toys for rich people, instead of valuable research and development that helps everyone.
As for myself, I’d love to see space tech thriving in India.
But all of the extremely poor people I encountered during my time in India, I can’t imagine that they would be pushing for this or even think about it beyond their daily struggles.
People say both quite a lot. Well, in case of the more general "industry" it's more like "let's roll back the spending quite a lot, except defense, shut that one down".
And I see no reason to expect anything different with space. Developing the technology to sustainably colonize other planets will bring opportunities that we cannot even imagine today. And I think we can all see such things, but it's easy to get mind-locked in the drama of the present while forgetting about the longer path that we are already set well upon. It is interesting to consider that the saying "When a wise man points to the moon, the fool examines the finger." is, itself, many centuries old.
But there's something much more interesting about Antarctica. The intuition is like you said, colonizing it is a million times easier than e.g. Mars. But this is not so simple. Antarctica is a pretty brutal place. It's not that just exposure to the climate entails death but there are also often violent storms. And the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter is why the population plummets from thousands to about a thousand during winter. Mars, by contrast, has a low pressure atmosphere, unbreathable air, and high radiation levels. This means you can only go outside with substantial protection which is comparable, though of course more extreme, than Antarctica. On the other hand, it's otherwise a very tame place. The most violent storm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze. This is one of the very few things thing that the book/movie "The Martian" intentionally faked. It's extremely telling that a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a disaster scenario on Mars.
Mars also shares a number of oddly convenient similarities with Earth. It shares a near identical day/night cycle, and even oddly enough has a near identical pattern of seasons due to near identical axial tilt. Because of this it doesn't sense to speak of 'Martian' temperatures since when/where are quite important. Summer near the equator gets right balmy at about 70F, though the lack of any meaningful greenhouse to trap in the heat does mean nights are still very cold. And of course Mars has absolutely abundant mineral resources. The red color itself is from iron oxides - rust. 0.3G will also offer unimaginable opportunities. For the most predictable launching vessels from Mars will be exponentially easier on Earth, and all the resources necessary to establish such industry exist in abundance on the planet. It will also undoubtedly spur on tourism, new sports, and so on. Some exciting potential!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
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The above is already longer than I thought it'd be, but really it's also necessary to mention something about computing. Try to mentally take yourself back some decades ago. Computers are literally the size of buildings with extremely fragile hardware, have enormous costs associated with them, cost millions of dollars, and need to be operated by large teams of highly skilled professionals. And in exchange for all of this you get again what were glorified calculators - the ENIAC [2] for instance was the first general purpose computer, and it achieved a blistering 35 divisions per second. Imagine somebody said soon you'd have computers sold for tens of dollars, capable of fitting in a pocket, that operate on the billions of operations per second. They'd become so ubiquitous and cheap you'd see them in practically everything. It's easy to take what we've achieved for granted, but we live in a reality that was, not long ago, the domain of fantasy.
Imagine if we had done the same to North America - the world might have never developed most of today's technology.
Having ISRO or Brahmos around, allows the country to keep some of its smartest in the country, before they are poached by the west.
Investment for an Olympics-type event can be useful if it results in the creation of durable multipurpose infrastructure like transit lines though.
The US Space Race helped us become a leader in satellite launch, which is a productive industry on its own terms now. Weather satellites, GPS, telecoms all benefit from it and provide tangible benefits to the population.
I’m not sure if Indian investment in space is more toward the useless or useful side of the spectrum though.
The thing that I do wonder is when a country like India is just replicating the work already done by the USA, how much of the innovation / potential has already been tapped. (Or now with the USA return to the moon program, is developing Orion and SLS and the gateway really going to do much that the Apollo program didn’t?)
The key word being devoted of course. If you fail to acknowledge any benefits from the space program other than getting things into orbit, then yes it'll be hard to see any value in space exploration beyond doing it for its own sake, which you may or may not see any value in since you yourself label it a fetish.
However the larger benefits of technology yielded by the space program are undeniable, including in some of the same fields you mentioned. From wikipedia
>NASA reports that 444,000 lives have been saved, 14,000 jobs have been created, 5 billion dollars in revenue has been generated, and there has been 6.2 billion dollars in cost reduction due to spin-off programs from NASA research in collaboration with various companies. Of the many beneficial NASA spinoff technologies there has been advancements in the fields of health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, energy and environment, information technology, and industrial productivity. Multiple products and innovations used in the daily life are results of space generated research. Solar panels, water-purification systems, dietary formulas and supplements, space suit materials in clothing, and global search and rescue systems are but a few examples of the beneficiary spinoffs that have been produced.
You may hand wave and say "oh but that could have been all discovered without going to space." Perhaps, but your thesis seems to be space exploration is a fetish with no benefits beyond making space exploration more efficient, which is patently untrue.
Your argument is also demonstrably weak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
As for my tone, perhaps you are right that I don't need to employ ridicule; but I wish to, because I feel contempt for this position so strongly I want to make it known. Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: alas, your comment history indicates that you've been using this site primarily for ideological battle rather than curiosity. We ban accounts that do that regardless of what they're battling for, because these two things aren't compatible, the one drowns out the other, and HN is for curiosity. If you'd please review the guidelines and use the site as intended, we'd be grateful.
You might also find these links helpful for getting the original spirit of the site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
But I do think my comments suffer from a meanness I'd like to avoid, and that my use of this site is something like a nicotine habit; I'd appreciate the nudge towards quitting.
Both the space programs and the military have well documented positive direct and indirect effects on private business, and both have many spinoff technologies that do benefit society. That is in addition to some well documented negative impacts, not to mention wars and death. But you didn't really want to talk about the economics, right?
If you just don't want to build weapons and don't think we should as a society, that's a reasonable view to hold, I can certainly find some ground to agree with you. Personally, I'll just suggest choosing clarity and not ridicule might help get that point across and convince more people. The sarcasm and ridicule tend to alienate, especially if you're talking directly to people who might enjoy space topics and would otherwise agree with you that weapon building is ugly business. You're choosing to ridicule innocent bystanders, rather than the people making weapons.
> Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.
That makes it sound like a conspiracy theory, as if nobody would be interested in space were it not for the sneaky military. Isaac Newton had a space fetish and died before NASA or the US military industrial complex began. You didn't get tricked into a NASA career, right? I know a few engineers that have worked in space & military applications, and all the ones I know participated knowingly.
Instead they deregulated and let private enterprise rebuild their economy.
On the other hand, India has already lifted 271 million people out of poverty in 10 years [1]. Can you name a single country that has achieved this feat in such a short span of time?
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-lifted-271-mill...
Indian market is one of the fastest growing smartphone market. Yet the biggest players are Chinese, Korean or American.
Railways has been the primary source of connection across the country and within cities. Yet metro trains are made by Japan and european companies.
In the cities IT services are the main source of economy, yet India never shipped its own microprocessor until very recently.
I can go on, but you get the point. Having a vague idea of how to do something vs shipping a world class product are two different things. What’s happening with the moon mission is the latter, though at a very beginning stage.
India to some degree skipped a step on the way. Much like central and rural African countries skipping broadband and going straight to mobile internet.
India took a similar path in 90s, selling IT services. But it isn’t simply enough given the size and the population of the country. The only sustainable way forward is to become strong exporters of good products along with services.
And the objection was around the seeker technology more specifically
Your behaviour is scandalous and anathema to any reasonable discussion. You simply invent your own argument to have with yourself. I'm finished here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to warn you about this more than once before. I don't want to ban you, so would you please fix this?
"Self made"
Exactly.
More importantly, corruption and backstabbing has so far ruined such talent, spilling into developed nations; so if there is a somewhat level playing field being established through ISRO and via Indian startups for Indians, then that's a great start.
EDIT: Since Hacker News won't allow me to post a reply. I am editing this post here.
You misunderstood what he said. He said that "majority of Indians" are doing cutting-edge research in foreign Universities. Not "majority of cutting-edge research" are being done by Indians. Both have different meanings. Most Indians who travel to foreign countries get higher education grants/fellowships to work on cutting-edge research. Very few Indians actually travel for undergraduate courses. India has prestigious universities like IITs/NITs which are equal to and in some cases better than Western counterparts. The reason why Indians travel to Western countries for research is because of lack of research grants to carry out Scientific experiments that might run into many millions/billions of dollars. In other words, this is brain drain at its finest.
Technology doesn't work like that, either. A country can "acquire deep technical know-how on engineering" by doing earth-bound R&D and working on its infrastructure problems...
Not to mention that they're not learning much new -- they just repeat what other countries have done since decades, most of which their engineers already know (they already send satellites and make military rockets and such).
Let's not pretend space vs local infrastructure is not an opportunity cost.
If you don't know then it's best not to talk because it only helps perpetuate the already negative stereotype that most have. The poor aren't even taxed in India. Indians are only taxed after they have a minimum salary of 7.5 lakhs per annum (accounting for all the deductions). Which is around 11,000 USD. And no this amount isn't low by Indian standards (the per-capita income is 7,060 USD). The cost of living in India is extremely low and inflation is well controlled (< 3%) so this amount is actually pretty decent to live in a Tier-1 city with a nice 2-bedroom apartment on rent. You can call this the lower middle class. And even they pay lesser tax until they hit the 20 lakhs per annum (30,000 USD) bracket (5%-20% based on where you fall in the slab rates).
And almost 70% of the rural households practice Agriculture in India. All these people are exempted from paying both Income Tax and GST. And if they have a bad season sometimes their loans are also waived.
India is a 3 trillion $ economy. India needs to find new ways to get to a 10 trillion $ economy if it wants to improve standards of living for all Indians and lift the remaining 300 million people out of poverty (it has already lifted 271 million people out of poverty in 10 years [1]. Can you name a single country that has achieved this feat in such a short span of time?). One of the areas where India can earn big is Space. ISRO is already a profitable enterprise for the Government. There is no reason why anyone will want it to be shutdown for anything. Especially when it is making huge profits.
[1]: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-lifted-271-mill...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ISRO/comments/ccbpvm/gslv_mk_iii_m1...
If in future (say 20 years down the line), a research agency needs to send their rover to the moon and they have two options: Pay $1bn to NASA, or $200mn to ISRO, who would you think they'd choose?
Private companies have already started using ISRO for launching mini satellites, and it may not be long before it becomes a cashflow positive company in the global market.
Just to add numbers ISRO’s budget is 0.5% of Indian GDP, given that more money is probably wasted because of corruption and stupid policies I think this is not the worse way to spend money.
India will become an economically powerful nation just like China is today. Just a matter of time.
No, it’s not. The middle income trap is treacherous. I am optimistic for India. But there will be struggles and sacrifices; ascendency is far from inevitable.
That isn’t the downside scenario. Countries that fail to ascend amidst population growth have a habit of collapsing and regressing, economically and politically. India has been doing a terrific job of traversing this terrain, a fact I largely ascribe to its democratic institutions.
But continued progress is far from a given. Ironically, one of the greatest risk factors is complacency from believing growth is inevitable. (This seems to be happening in China.)
EDIT: and there’s empirical support for my supposition that not being dependent on primary commodities (ie not having the “resource curse”) improves the odds of escaping the middle income trap: https://ideas.repec.org/p/jet/dpaper/dpaper482.html
“The results of our analyses suggest that the middle-income trap is a form of Dutch disease or a 'resource curse' in the middle-income stage.”
Statistically speaking, this is unlikely. Not having concentrated natural resources helps. But the base odds around development economics are precarious.
The most likely outcome is populist collapse, mass emigration and developmental reversal. Only vigilance can guard against that. If India’s populace starts believing growth or stable stagnation are the most likely outcomes, that itself almost assured a negative outcome. (The latter claim based on weaker statistics than the former around the base odds of development.)
Britain has seen zero net economic growth since 2006 (that's before any inflation adjustment). That's true of most of developed Europe. France's GDP is not much higher than it was in 2007, without an inflation adjustment (in real terms they've seen at least 20% contraction, plausibly worse given the currency debasement that has gone on since then).
Finland and Denmark, two of the nicest, most highly educated countries in world history, have seen zero net economic expansion since 2008. Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands also fall into that box (the Netherlands economy is smaller in nominal terms than it was in 2008; in real terms it's at least 20-25% smaller).
Germany, the engine of Europe, has seen somewhere between very little and zero real net economic expansion since 2008 ($3.75t economy in 2008, $4t economy in 2018).
Japan has seen zero net economic growth since 1994, a quarter century. Japan is a highly advanced, low crime, high education, high standard of living, high skill nation.
Indonesia was a boom economy and is generally consider a high growth potential economy. Yet their economy is not much larger today than it was in 2011 (~$900b in 2011, $1t today). With even a small inflation adjustment it has seen close to zero net growth.
Russia has seen zero net economic growth for a decade. The same is true for Belarus.
Many other middle income countries in Europe, like Czech or Hungary, have seen close to zero net economic growth for a decade.
The Greek economy has been reset back to where it was around 2003.
Ukraine has seen zero net economic growth since ~1989 approximately.
Egypt's economy is approximately where it was in 2011.
Nigeria's economy hasn't net expanded since 2011 ($411b in 2011, $397b in 2018; and it has considerably contracted since 2014; they partially fall under resource curse though).
Brazil has seen zero net economic growth since 2009-2010.
Mexico has seen almost zero net economic growth since 2007 (all population expansion, zero per capita growth); on an inflation adjusted basis, it is zero or negative.
Turkey has seen zero net economic growth since 2007 ($764b economy in 2007; $766b in 2018).
South Africa has seen zero net economic growth since 2010.
Growth is anything but a given.
Firstly, net GDP, or net economic growth isn’t a thing. (Value added, and GDP is already a net measure).
Real (inflation adjusted) UK GDP has definitely increased since 2006. Real GDP per capita has also increased slightly.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/times...
France’s GDP contracted by 20%? Not according to the figures I’m looking at.
You’re just making stuff up.
Additionally, it seems to me that something important happened to the global economy right after 2007, so that’s a somewhat cherry-picked date.
With all due respect, as someone who has done work in developmental economics and macroeconomic finance, this is wrong. I’d encourage you to consider the literature. One never loses from a realistic view of the landscape.
Have other nations fallen victim to this trap, in the recent past - say 30-50 years or so?
I fully agree that ascendancy or primacy is far from inevitable and am generally far less optimistic than you , in these things.
But could you shed light on what sorts of factors prevented a nation similar in its growth spurt from continued growth?
What kneecapped them?
Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Czech, Hungary, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile
There are several other nations in Europe and Latin America, that have been stuck in the middle income trap for some time (such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Panama, Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria).
Albania and Macedonia have been stuck in it, with little further progress, since the early to mid 2000s.
Africa has a few others besides South Africa, such as Gabon (trapped since the mid 1970s), Botswana (trapped since 1990) and Algeria (since the early 1980s).
Lebanon has been stuck for 20 years. Jordan has been stuck since the early 1980s.
Portugal may just be outside of it or at the ceiling, at $23k per capita; however in inflation adjusted terms they've seen close to zero per capita growth since 1992. Greece is an odd case, hard to say whether they ever escaped the middle income trap, or whether the good years before the crash were entirely fake. On an inflation adjusted basis Greece has also seen close to zero per capita growth since 1992.
Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabh...
What does this even mean? Politicians with criminal cases against them(not convicted) in India is as old as 1947. It's very easy to charge someone and shift the burden to the charged person that they prove themselves innocent.
That doesn't mean there aren't bad people, it just takes a lot of time before this changes. Singling out a single party on a forum where little people have cultural context just shows the bias.
What I mean to say is this crime in politics will continue to exist unless there is more diversity in education paths in India. As a highschooler in your average tier 2 Indian city, The only options (simply based on educational quality, socio-economic pressure, and job opportunities) were a) engineering b) medicine c) law/accounting. I barely knew anyone from my high school that wanted to pursue public office (even later in life, if not immediately).
> That doesn't mean there aren't bad people, it just takes a lot of time before this changes. Singling out a single party on a forum where little people have cultural context just shows the bias.
That's a load of BS. If you managed to open the source I linked it clearly states 39% of Congress leaders have cases against them too. In the second line. I mentioned BJP because of the parent comment I was responding to. Your attempt at framing my comment as some sort of partisan propaganda is mindboggling.
You say many haven’t been convicted formally. Reading between the lines, how many of those cases are likely to have been guilty of the crime, regardless of the workings of the court?
Mediocrity at best?
Lately, there will be one random idiot saying something about hygiene. But then every single comment that follows will be about, how no one has the right to say that.
How about you guys don't react to that crap for once?
Watch Live: Launch of Chandrayaan 2 by GSLV MkIII-M1 Vehicle
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a147838...
https://www.isro.gov.in/mars-orbiter-mission-completes-1000-...
The US series of surveyor probes landed on the moon on the first try. I think it's reasonable to argue that these were the first US attempts to land on the moon - while the Ranger probes had seismometer capsules with retrorockets, they were meant to crash into the moon at 150 miles per hour and survive.
Good for them. Personally it helps me (living very comfortably in an European country) not to feel any guild reading articles like https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/asia/india-water-cr...
A lot of that homeless could be solved with more equal wealth distribution.
30:1 between US and India according to google (not accounting for PPP).
It always is worth. These things inspire the nation. Instill pride. They work wonders. And India's space program is much less expensive than many other nations. India sent a rocket to Mars that was cheaper than the budget for the movie Interstellar.
The main problem is, we will all probably die before we see the benefit (instead we'll see losses). So, how do we value the lives of posterity in comparison today.
I find it ironic how the same people who use the "think of the children" argument the most are also the most against investing in space exploration.
My bias is also that we should value posterity the same as we value humans alive today. But then again, we still can't even agree on the basic question of whether a life in Africa is worth the same as a life in the United States.
You think it’s worth it. I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m simply saying, if you ask poor people, many of them won’t think it’s worth it. And most people in India are very poor.
Is analyzing things before during and after making decisions no longer an acceptable thing to do in 2019?
This is false dichotomy - one doesn't have to cease for other to exist and ceasing one doesn't automatically make the other better.
All very good questions. I think the act of asking them is more important than merely stating that the space program is either worth it or not worth it.