India's Chandrayaan-3 launches to explore moons water rich South Pole
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
By making comments like "poor country, donate money" and "Brits are sending money [...]" (actual flagged comments here) some of us are showing inherent racism. One world-one people, guys. It is really not that hard.
Snickering is part of the equation. And counter-snickering with big launches and achievements is also part of the equation.
To put things in perspective: The US declared its "War on Poverty" in January 1964. Tried to send rockets to the moon in March 1964. Signed the Civil Rights Act into force in early July 1964. Got the first rocket to the moon successfully in late July 1964.
So it's not like other "space-faring nations" had everything sorted out before "wasting money on space adventures". That entire "They should fix their social net / railroads / ... before entering the space race"-thing is just pulling up the ladder behind oneself.
If you extrapolate developmental indicators historically (eg. the AHDI [0]), India in the 2010-2020 period is roughly comparable to the US in the 1950-1960 period.
None of this is surprising if you have an background with US economic history. Similar to India today, the US in the 1940-1970 period had an industrialized half (the North, Midwest, and Western US) and less industrialized hinterland (Appalachia, South, Southwest).
A major component of America's development was because of massive industrial projects targeting Appalachia, South, and Southwest America (eg. TVA, Space Grants, NASA Huntsville, Interstate Highways) along with the expansion of the social safety net (eg. Great Society, War Against Poverty, Civil Rights Act, LBJ's entire domestic policy)
India is seeing a similar transformation via large industrial projects and an expansion of the social safety net via welfare programs/yojanas/"freebies".
This can be seen starkly with Rajasthan (INC run) and Gujarat (BJP run). Both share a similar culture and had similarly laggard developmental statistics in 2000, yet by 2019 both have converged with each other [1], as well as at the developmental work occurring in both Uttar Pradesh (BJP run) and Odisha (non-BJP run).
[0] - https://frdelpino.es/investigacion/en/category/01_social-sci...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_un...
Like, seriously? Do people fall for this type of propaganda? India’s gdp per capita is 10x lower than the lowest eu member states.
Any criticism that India's space program resources are better spent elsewhere applied just the same to NASA (and in some ways still applies, given how backwards some parts and aspects of the US are): either people see value in such a program (then India is just fine) or they don't (then NASA should shut down immediately).
Meanwhile, a large portion of India doesn’t even have potable water.
Try harder.
With HAL, Air India and the aviation industry going private, there might be more opportunities for prospective aerospace experts to build out their own industry after stints at ISRO/Brahmos.
India produces amazing mechanical engineers. As compared to other difficult to break in industries (Chips, Hi-tech agriculture, Genomics), India is actually well situated to break into the aviation industry successfully.
Ofc, Indian institutions are averse to privatization. So it has been a slow process. That being said, the direction of change is towards steady privatization.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/indian-govt-proposes-s...
[2] https://theprint.in/economy/rafale-snub-no-death-knell-hals-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-secon...
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/so...
[1] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/argentina/spain...
Have to wait and see. Only time will tell.
> Simon Kuznets, the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Economics, famously stated there were four types of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan and Argentina
But Argentina also has a peculiar, almost hard to believe tendency to shoot itself in the foot economically
Daron Acemolgu's career making paper "The Role of Institutions in Growth and Development" [0] touches on this exact dichotomy.
Don't you think those two are contradictory?
If what you say is the case then why is China struggling to retaliate in the chip war?
https://fortune.com/2023/04/04/china-struggles-retaliate-aga...
No, because high quality development focuses on innovation, sustainability and green development instead of raw growth via low quality development (construction, low-end manufacturing etc.) They could ramp up low quality development faster and thus achieving higher growth rates in the short term. But they are focusing on long term strategic goals.
China just retaliated by issuing export restrictions for some rare earths, which is an indicator that they are rapidly approaching self sufficiency in many aspects. There are still some major hurdles(EUV alternatives, high end AI accelerators, software stack) but if the current speed of development is any indication, then these too will be overcome and probably much faster than many anticipate.
Mathematically there can be only rate of growth at any point in time.
> But they are focusing on long term strategic goals.
You can say the same about US.
> There are still some major hurdles(EUV alternatives, high end AI accelerators, software stack) but if the current speed of development is any indication, then these too will be overcome and probably much faster than many anticipate.
It can go this or that way. With access to Western tech cut off, rate of pilfering from the West will also decrease, so that needs to be factored in too.
Huh? I don't understand what you mean by that. Different development strategies can result in different growth rates. Some will just take longer to ramp up but will pay off in the long term.
> You can say the same about US.
All major developed economies try to focus on high quality growth. The question is who is able to accomplish their goals faster/better. Considering the flexibility, strategic planning and political will, my bet in on China.
> It can go this or that way. With access to Western tech cut off, rate of pilfering from the West will also decrease, so that needs to be factored in too.
That is exactly why they are doing dual circulation and focusing on Latam, Asia and a Africa.
Republic of Korea, Japan got rich before they got old. China got old before it got rich.
India disappoints both its optimists and pessimists. It is a middling country with growth spurts here and there, which is admirable in its own way.
I am looking at the following data and can see multiple 3s and 5s. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/gdp-growth-r...
Very true. Economic growth is going to be rough for Mainland China for the next several years, but that doesn't preclude becoming a developed country eventually.
China today in 2023 is at roughly the same spot as Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea were in the 1980s. All 3 countries became developed, but at different paces. For example, Malaysia only hit the developed country precipice in 2021 (0.8 HDI), Taiwan in the 1990s, and South Korea in 2000. South Korea and Taiwan didn't become Advanced Economies until the late 2000s/early 2010s.
> India disappoints both its optimists and pessimists. It is a middling country with growth spurts here and there
Because India is incorrectly being compared with China. India is 15-20 years behind China because China opened their markets in 1973-1978, while India didn't conduct similar market reforms until 1992-1996. When factoring that 15-20 year lag, comparisons start making sense [1]
[1] - https://www.mitsui.com/mgssi/en/report/detail/__icsFiles/afi...
Yes an no, but mostly no.
No in the sense that one of the authors who coined the term did IRC follow up study and explicitly does not think it exists.
The mostly No part: middle income trap, according to the authors / as metric of development is about countries being unable to progress up higher value economic efforts, which then constrains per capita income potential. But the actual "trap" is being stuck in value chain. If one use that metric, PRC is LONG PAST middle income "trap", apart from US, PRC has relatively complete chain across broad spectrum of sectors in the world. Third place is not even close. The question is really what if even being competent and productive at everything simply is not sufficient to uplift everyone because base population is so massive. There's an upper bound on how many high skilled talent economy can support.
The yes part is being stuck in "middle income", which if you look at world bank revised 2024 high income range is 13,846, PRC 2023 projection is ~13,500, it's basically there, almost inevitable with a few more years of even modest growth even if threshold keeps getting revised up. And if you think PRC is massively lying about population like some demographers (-200m people) then PRC's been high income for a while.
The real question behind these "middle income" rhetoric with respect to PRC is can PRC reach advanced economy levels of high income, and the answer is unlikely because again there's simply too many useless people, 600m+ living on less than $2000 who got left behind by modernization that will drag the per capita stats down until they die. On the other hand they will be the first to go since cohort skews old. Let that stats settle in for a second though, ~40% of population contributes about 5% of economy. Once they start dying (2050+) PRC per capita will start trending towards advanced economy with high % of skilled people wages because PRC population with start reflecting composition of advanced economy without 200m+ farmers and 100s million more low skilled people stuck in informal economy. It's why Xi's China dream only targets modest 40k per capita by 2050 (I think in PPP terms). BTW even PRC demographers realized in 80s that PRC was trending towards old before rich, the entire will PRC get rich before old is western rhetoric. And TBH relative to PRC demography plan (one of the few examples of actual PRC long term planning) - PRC currently doing about expection.
>You do not grow like your teens and 20s in your 40s and 50s.
This is simplistic. A society with 25% skilled labour is going to grow differently than one with 60-80% (advanced economy). PRC is former, trending towards the latter. She's spitting out OECD combined in STEM talent per year, and even with 20% youth unemployment that's stupid amount of talent to improve productivity. The TLDR is PRC is in process of building 5x-10x the amount of skilled talent that pushed the them to 15T economy. It's the greatest high skill demographics divident in human history, even if net demographics will decline. The question is where will that get them? Advanced economy income? My guess is no, but will actually happen is PRC talent will increasingly compete and take pie from high income economies, and wages will start to converge. PRC will get modestly richer while advanced economies will start to get poorer.
On India, I think they'll be a much less successful PRC. Eventually they'll get there, i.e. they'll escape the middle income trap in the sense they will probably be able to competently develop most sectors indigenously - they won't actually be "trapped" by developement. But their sheer population 1.6B+ will likely trap their per capita by denominator of having so many unproductive people - India demographic divident is happening among their states with bad HDI. Nevermind unemployed STEM in PRC, their youth unemployment rate is like 40% (which western MSM doesn't seems to talk about) while being also being less educated with what talent they do generate being highly suceptible to being brain drained. It's... suboptimal.
PRC demographics, as in actual ability to coordinate and exploit divident is SIGNIFICANTLY better than India's whose trending toward's PRC demographers worst nightmare. 100s of millions of undereducated and underemployed youths while their brightest get brain drained to advanced economies.
PRC has the best high skilled demographics in recorded history in the next 30 years. It's only after mid century demographics / risk of Japanification is an issue. PRC demographic collapists (i.e. Zeihan tards) thinks PRC is going to tumble sharply from where she is now and soon, but really she's going to stagnate or fall slowly from a significantly higher position decades from now.
This is a very questionable statement.
"China’s overall education rate is one of the lowest in the middle-income world ... Comparing China’s human capital with that of other countries, it is not only systemically lower than South Korea, Ireland, and other “graduates” out of middle-income status, it is also lower than virtually all other middle-income countries." [0]
This does not mean economic collapse or demise, but there is a very real human capital issue at a macro-level. That said, policymakers in the PRC know this and have been working with SIEPR at Stanford for over a decade on rectifying this at a policymaking level, but there are some very real systemic issues that mean China c. 2023 cannot be compared with countries at a similar levels of development such as Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia, etc.
[0] - https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/trackin...
E: And in agreement, yes there will be macro level issues to low per capita performance - it's not going to be pretty but it's not going to be collapse either. A country can simulatenously improve/lead at top while bottom languish/decline.
Because all those countries largely aligned with the liberal international order and didn't try to antagonize their neighbors.
A notable exception to your list is Russia, a fellow upper middle income country that in 2010-2014 was on the precipice of becoming a developed country (HDI above 0.800 AND GDP per Capita above $12,000/yr c. 2010-13)
Russia began playing a belligerent role in Georgia/Abkhazia/Ossetia (2008-Present), Ukraine (2014-present), Syria (2015-present), and the CAR (2018-president) and we burnt multiple cycles worrying about them.
When I was on the Hill, we were honestly neutral/indifferent about China until you guys hacked our companies (Google, Lockheed Martin) and our government (OPM Hack in 2015, CIA in 2012-13).
This is just the US. The leadership in post-2011 China has unnecessarily antagonized Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Phillipines, India, Australia, and Vietnam despite all those countries preferring to the neutral in any US-PRC confrontation.
All the hawkish comments on here hoping for the collapse of the PRC are disgusting and do not reflect what those of us in a decisionmaking capacity or adjacent to those think.
Yet unbridled nationalism and hubris by commentators on both sides is impacting the ability to get shit done.
> Like there simply isn't any time period in the past where one country had population or institutions to do so, nor are any countries likely to match including US who would to increase immigration to politically unfeasible levels, or (IMO) India even with 1.6B pop unless they manage to not only stop crippling brain drain but also coordinate talent domestically on par with PRC capabilities
India in 2023 is a country with developmental indicators, institutions, and infrastructure largely on par with the PRC in the 2000-2003 period.
A lot of the same problems you mentioned about India are the exact same problems China faced and overcame, and the same playbook is being applied there.
In fact, the same kind of commentary you are bristling too is the exact same commentary people used to give China during the exact same time period, and it's kind of funny seeing Chinese commentators reusing the same comments we Americans made about China in the 2000-2015 period on India.
> A country can simulatenously improve/lead at top while bottom languish/decline
This is a still an open question. No country has ever transitioned from a developing country to an advanced economy with as crippling a Human Capital Handicap as the PRC today. The last large upper middle income countries that had a similar handicap were Mexico, Brazil, Türkiye, and Malaysia.
None of these countries are shitholes, but when they reached a similar pivot as China did today in the late 90s/early 2000s, they had the need to resort to extensive social and economic reforms. While Malaysia has succeeded at that, this hasn't been as successful in Brazil, Türkiye, and Mexico.
If I was a gambling man, I'd lean towards assuming this transition will be a protracted affair. Not "institutions collapse" bad but 7-10 years of malaise, because building human capital takes time and effort.
Difference between RU and PRC is RU actually mired in kinetic war with neighbours vs PRC grey zone that pushes region to some security hedging but not at expense of PRC trade. IMO that's natural/forgone, and let's not forget PRC antagonism was rarely PRC initiated. SKR over THAAD, Japan was always weary. PRC also last to reclaim/militarized SCS started by Vietnam (barring Brunei) but doing so at PRC scale revealed gap in capability causing others to hedge and they still do. Current US posture in region under Trump and Biden admins still pale in comparison to initial deterrence proposals of ringing PRC with missiles and agile basing. AU is AU they couldn't stay neutral if US pushed. But overall current US posture is still shadow of what they thought they could get despite going HAM on diplomatic efforts.
On India, note elsewhere I said I'm optimistic they'll get shit together eventually but unlikely to replicate PRC because they lack same levers for state capacity. It's not unreasonable to observe India does not have the same favourable headwinds as PRC in 2000s, i.e. PRC+1 is mostly shifting to where PRC willing to shift and that's ASEAN not India who is unlikely to capture PRC levels of manufacturing base and ability to snowball development for the simple reason that PRC is not willing to relinquish manufacturing advantage and west can only shift so much. The fact that India is at PRC early 2000s indicators despite starting with comparable if not favourable conditions and still not addressing some of the major social hurdles PRC has mostly addressed at the time (i.e. single language to facilitate migrant / labour transfers), reflect inherent inefficiencies that is relatively more difficult to coordinate around. India on par with PRC in 2000 is still India 20 years behind due to systemic differences that extrapolated will unlikely see India catch up at 1:1 time scale.
And yes consensus in washington was OPM fair game but PRC industrial espionage that pushed up PRC industry to compete with west was the real concern. Entire MIC2025 drama. And circling back to India this is exactly why they're not squeezing the level same tech transfers PRC was able to because everyone wised up. The playbook doesn't work as well anymore. US willing to cripple JP semi despite JP being fully LIO aligned, ultimately no one is going to want India to repeat a PRC including the PRC. Nevermind studies showing export oriented models working increasingly less well - countries milk industrialization opportunities faster and settle at lower levels of income due to labour saving technologies that remove a lot of human potential from being realized. Will India make it? Again IMO, yes, but it will take longer and the race against Indian demographics much more difficult. PRC "only" saddled with 600m farmers and informal economy "halfwits" despite deliberate family planning policy to mitigate, India will likely have 1B+ having tried and fail family planning of their own, that's another tier of drag to govern around.
>No country has ever transitioned from a developing country to an advanced economy with as crippling a Human Capital Handicap as the PRC today.
Sure but PRC doesn't need to be advanced across the board it needs regions to be sufficiently advanced to compete with advanced economies and by and large it already has at the scale of tier 1/2 efforts. PRC isn't a large country - it's a massive country the scale dynamics operates differently than turkey mexico or malaysia. At PRC scale, 5M STEM per year is enough to saturate/build up strategic industries with talent and directly challenge advanced economies across the board vs 100,000s of from "large" countries that still has to pick and choose. I'm one of the first to note PRC isn't going to uplift everyone to advanced indicators but it will uplift enough to be extremely competitive and resulting in advanced economies also suffering malaise (which many already are) by spreading out the pie. Convergence is as much about PRC doing better but also incumbents doing worse because they need to compete with segements of PRC that can compete. And that segment set to massively expand in next 30 years while current level is already competing/leading in industries with historically dominant western share. Time and effort has been put in via initiatives in 90s and early 00s and we're approaching divident reaping phase. There's a decent report on PRC leveraging scale in domestic efforts and eventual effect on oversea share of incumbents and effect was something like 50-90% reduction in operating margins of leading (mostly western companies) when PRC pushes surplus abroad. Hence why PRC competitiveness at even current PRC scale enabled by low % per capita skill is making advanced economies justifiably nervous.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/goldman-sa...
Air India going private isn’t a sign of success in the industry. The government ran in into the ground, it got purchased without much of that debt, and the Tatas have limits to how quickly they can remove the tenured “government job” bureaucrats from the system. The government is still doing air India major favors by heavily restricting access to Indian passengers by foreign airlines (just this year they denied emirates an upgrade from 50000/seats a week, and denied a United/emirates codeshare agreement). This ends up hurting them too since they are limited to 50000/seats a week. One place I will give Indian aviation major credit is the air traffic upgrades they’ve done over the past 20 years. They are almost as safe as American airspace with some of the busiest airports in the world.
I think India has a lot of potential though, especially in medical fields, I mean 2/3 of the world already has Indian vaccines don’t they?
furthermore, the fascination with space missions generates hordes of inspired children who will study and thus this plant the seeds of scientists for future generations who will solve tomorrow's problems (in practice, it is a long-term investment)
of the race to the moon we now have the practical and common use of transistors and chips, led, batteries, pace makers, medical pumps, thermal insulation and dozens of other things we use and take for granted every day
to prefer little and bad immediately at the expense of much and good in the future is a very short-sighted and stupid attitude
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/30152.jpeg
You can think of these as lower levels of the pyramid that support the rocket at the top. Each of these require people to learn these things at a very high level. Local firms must learn to manufacture complex components at high tolerances, universities must produce graduates who are good enough to tackle these problems, government departments have to build the expertise to manage these projects. Forming even more of a broad base of the pyramid.
Once you have built the rocket, all this expertise doesn't just go away. All these trained people, and the processes and institutions that created those trained people, will not go away. They will go into other areas and solve other problems in a much better fashion than if they had not been trained such.
If you instead try to build a car instead, the pyramid will be much shorter, and the type of expertise required will be much less. The training processes will be worse. The spillover effects into the economy would be much less.
Imagine one day the first Dalit in space, what message it would send.
And asteroid-like orbital elements or NORAD TLE's don't seem to apply here (?) since
> A two-line element set (TLE) is a data format encoding a list of orbital elements of an Earth-orbiting object for a given point in time, the epoch.
which won't really be true in its later part of the orbit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-3#/media/File:Anim...) and it is changing its orbit constantly
Also check out the Virtual Telescope Project, they are the channel when it comes to observing objects live: https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/news/
(we are mostly focused on asteroids)
the fallout of this is spacewar. And billions killed. it is a new frontier for sure. And I am not looking forward to it.
Spacewar is a possible future, and I will not deny that. But one could apply the same pessimistic view to not going to space as well.
"The fallout of not going to space is resource wars. Billions killed, their bodies harvested in order to extract water and nutrients".
However, it is not "unnecessarily" pessimistic. There are actual fiction books, congressional hearings, military strategies in motion that play out such outcomes. The US has a space force command. And missiles to space have been sent to knock out targets.
Calling it a fallout, implies when all things fail and hell breaks loose.
A video call with fellow human of another planet will be dope. Till then, live long and prosper!.
Anyways, congrats India, this is not something casual. The entire ISRO team deserves the applause.
PS: Dumb question, why is it taking so long to reach to that region of moon?
I’m a believer that humans may take 100s of years to be multi planetary, but we’ll be making increasing semi-autonomous intelligent rovers that help us build habitats in space.
Mars and moon is 100% robots. It’s an incredible achievement to put intelligence on other planets.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
That said, congratulations to India and I wish Chandrayaan-3 the best of success.
Alas, in that context this technological progress is still a good thing because diverting money to more govt bureaucracies will not fix anything. At least here we see the money going to somewhat good use. Though from what I’ve heard, ISRO is also a bloated bureaucracy, albeit in the same way NASA is a bloated bureaucracy compared to SpaceX (ISRO is for all I’ve heard worse than NASA in how bloated and inefficient it is, I’m surprised they ever manage to launch anything)