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Comment by missosoup | Hacker News Reader

> I think you are unnecessarily making this political

GP is just highlighting that India's ruling party made this unnecessarily political. I'm not sure why it's being downvoted when it's factually accurate and is interesting in the context of the discussion. This is exactly the same thing that was going on in the Soviet Union where space project schedules were dictated by key party dates and celebrations. Not sure if it was a factor here, but multiple Soviet missions suffered due to being pushed to meet politically motivated party deadlines.

Most of the science is indeed onboard the orbiter. The mission was a success for the scientists.

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> GP is just highlighting that India's ruling party made this unnecessarily political. I'm not sure why it's being downvoted when it's factually accurate and is interesting in the context of the discussion.

Could you share some citations to justify your comment? There is no evidence out there that Chandrayaan was politicized by the Government. ISRO is funded by the Government and Department of Space directly comes under the PM. So, there is bound to be some Government/Minister presence.

Why should there be something distracting on launch day ?

Distracting to whom? The scientists were pretty much focussed with their tasks.

You are telling me ISRO spent no resources catering to this visit. Even 0.1% of resources, mindshare and energy wasted on landing day is stupid IMO. Do all speeches, visits the next day. Modi was clearly there for a photo op.

To be fair, I remember PM Manmohan Singh also in ISRO live streams so that wasn't it.

My issue is that the 100 day celebration was timed around rover landing and unfortunately rover did not land.

The assumption GP made is that government deliberately planned their 100 days in office and the moon landing date to coincide. But the actual date of mission was different and was posponded last minute(literally) because of a leakage. So if the ruling party (ruling for past 5 years) really wanted the dates to coincide they would have easily scheduled the initial date to coincide.

So there is no 'factual' correctness in the comment. And adding political angle and then comparing India to Soviet based on that is unnecessary.

He has not ruled "since 5yrs"

His second term just started in May

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