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Comment by namanaggarwal | Hacker News Reader

I just feel that headline is not accurate. It seems to be suggesting that first try failed, when it was actually aborted.

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Nytimes does that fairly often. Theres always an undertone of negativity about Indias space program. But they're just responding to market needs cant really blame them.

The markets need to undercut the indian space program?

The market need to undermine progress made by other countries to feel good about themselves. Its a type of thinking that says we can only be great when others don't make any progress.

>> But they're just responding to market needs

you don't seem to have journalism high in you r opinion

I doubt Journalists hold present-day journalism in high opinion.

NewYrokTimes is perhaps the biggest offender who gets away with this. All I can say is after reading Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, I can never trust NYT.

100 agree. Although rather unclear, my comment was hinting at the fact that even if we all think that journalism is not what it used to be, cynicism shouldn't win over idealism...

I have incentives high up in my opinion. There's a huge segment of population that loves to undermine progress or those taking bold decisions. There's an incentive to feed pessimism and of course NYT as a business will tap into that. There aren't many people who will be excited when somebody else makes progress and NYT is just cashing in on it. I don't judge them, its just what it is. I would rather be mindful of their bads and take their goods than impose unreasonably high standards on NYT.

I'm pretty sure that snarky tone is standard in NY Times reporting and they'd have said the same thing if it was a US space launch.

I do not know if it would be different had it been a US launch, but know for sure NYT has a history of trying to undermine any/all progress made by India, especially during the last term and the existing term of Narendra Modi Government.

It appears the NYT journos know more about India than Indians, who elected Narendra Modi by landslide majority (last and this term). NYT regularly tries to highlight isolated incidents as communal rift (standard playbook on India).

Lynchings need to be highlighted regardless of the govt. So does the space program in good light. It doesn't have to be either / or .

not just the space program

I don't really read it as inaccurate. They did launch the Chandrayaan-2 mission on the 2nd attempt after the first attempt was aborted. If the first try had failed completely, it wouldn't necessarily still be the Chandrayaan-2 moon mission.

Not sure why some folks are upset about the tone of the article. I read the entire article and didn't find anything snarky or condescending towards India and their ambitious space program.

For what it's worth, I'm Indian.

Headline is misleading. A fair number of launches are pushed back due to a number of reasons and this is definitely worthwhile mentioning in the article itself. But mentioning "on second try" in the title itself is misleading as you can see in the comments where multiple people were led to believe that the first attempt was a failure instead of an abort (which isn't a failure).

"India Launches Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission" is a more unbiased title in my opinion.

Irrespective of what nationality you belong to, the phrase "second try" means same to all. Second try is confusing and misleading, it means you failed on the first try, although the word failure is different to all. If you think a technical snag in a space program which involves a lot of complexity means a project failure then I don't blame you for liking the article but for the majority of the people who understand the level of complexity in such program are less critical on the delays and snags.

Second try at launching... that is literally what happened. I feel like you are just projecting with your interpretation. Second try means literally that... a second attempt. Which is exactly what happened because technical issues forced them to abort on the first attempt...

They do it because nyt is sister of bbc. they run indophobic propaganda all the time and get that juicy 'outrage based' traffic.

https://www.opindia.com/2019/03/the-new-york-times-peddles-a...

I had same thought when I read that title , but again its NYTimes , we all know how they reacted to Mars program 2 years back.

So the first try failed?

It could only fail if it was attempted.

It was attempted. It failed due to a technical issue requiring abort of launch.

The countdown timer was stopped 1hr before the launch when an anomaly was detected. I suppose by some measure it could be considered as "first attempt failure".

The more remarkable thing though is they un-fueled the launch vehicle, fixed the issue, made it launch worthy, and launched it in just under one week.

I can't recall a similar recovery in such a short period of time for a project of such magnitude.

It's very impressive. The Russians also fixed the insulation on their Proton rocket carrying Spektr-RG with some glue and launched a day later! They had to wait a month after the previous problem, however, which required a battery replacement: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spektr-rg-launch.html

Also, it was aborted "due to abundance of caution."

Maybe I'm misunderstanding numbers, but if the first attempt was aborted then this is the second attempt?

Launches are aborted or delayed for many reasons. The headline mentioning Second Attempt is not relevant and only serves as a negative connotation which most readers would equate with failure.

The first attempt was aborted so it shouldn't count. This time we don't know if it will be aborted again, so we cannot say if it's an attempt at all. The title should just say "India Launches Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission", period

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