Chandrayaan-3 Lands on the Moon | Hacker News Reader

Chandrayaan-3 Lands on the Moon

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Congratulations ISRO. What you have achieved with what you have got, its truly marvelous.

Without context this could be interpreted as patronizing (or worse). You’re talking about their small budget, right?

I'd love to know the total cost of the whole project. This has go to be the cheapest moon landing ever, right?

On the day of the launch, news agency Reuters said in a report that Chandrayaan-3 has been built on a budget of just under $75 million (around ₹ 615 crore).

Wow, so definitely well within the range of private industry or even private individuals.

This will inspire more Indians to go into STEM and stay in India. Golden age of India's space ambitions has arrived.

Congrats. Landing on the moon is hard.

This makes India just the 4th country to land on the moon.

It seems like there's a lot of renewed activity of various nations trying to land on the moon recently. Is this just a rite of passage for a space program? Or is there some other reason? I have to imagine that if there was actually some real benefit then USA would still be sending landers all the time. Curious what the interest is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program

less a rite of passage, more a new wave of activity.

Back in 2017 ISRO had a record setting 104 satellites deployed on a single launch. Everyone said India would become the goto destination for cheap launches. Since then tens of thousands of satellites have been launched but very few via ISRO. So for whatever reason they totally missed that boat, and maybe their moon/sun/human space flight stuff is some kind of pivot.

Wouldn’t say they missed the boat. ISRO did launch some of the OneWeb constellation recently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewSpace_India_Limited

It’s just a slow ramp up. India’s rockets aren’t yet capable pf heavy payloads like SpaceX.

Out of curiosity, what are flat earthers saying? That Russia faked a crash and India faked a success? Why?!

You can't logic your way out of a position you didn't logic your way into.

Well put.

Yeah, a lot of people have this idea that you fight misinformation with calm, collected, rational argument.

Well, I guess I need to prepare a cold, calm, collected rational argument about how that isn't at all effective, heh.

Google doesn't return any meaningful results for this. Is this your quote? It's really good and I'd like to duplicate it for regular use.

Edit: Aha I found it by relaxing the query params: probably Jonathan Swift.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/10/reason-out/?amp=1

> Jonathan Swift

Well that makes some sense. Thanks for highlighting this excellent quote.

Only if you can prove that birds are real.

A friend of mine said:

You can't logic your way out of a crazy box.

(Referring how to treat with people who are somewhat mentally Disturbed)

NASA paid both to keep the globe earth delusion alive

Or something like that

The counter-conspiracy is that flat earthism is larger than it actually is. It's basically a meme about making fun of them, when I reckon in reality there's not a lot of them; I would bet there's a percentage of flat earthers well below the lizardman constant of 4%.

So in effect, the Flat Earth theory is popular purely because of people making fun of it. There are no more flat earthers than people who hear voices or that believe they are actually reincarnated Jesus.

There may be a sub-group that just wants to be open-minded. I'm 100% a science guy, but I refuse to put the probability of flat earth at 0%. Maybe 0.00000000000000001%, but not 0. :-)

I used to work with an engineer that assured me he had looked into flat earth theory and it was "legit". This same person told me he could re-write Terraform in a day, so my view of him was skewed.

However, I was genuinely surprised to find a real flat-earther in a technical role.

I should have added, re-write in Powershell. Scary.

I kind of like flat earth because it uses all the bad argument techniques that people I can't criticize on HN without getting downvotes use. Thus, it provides a good example cases for most common bad arguments used in online debates, especially science related debates.

Somebody should put together a dictionary of informal fallacies with examples from the flat earth movement because it is not politically incorrect to criticize them while it is to criticize other movements that are more popular that regularly employ these fallacies.

One more thing: speaking of people believing they're Christ, a random guy in China in the 1850s started to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and started the biggest civil war in world history.

That’s what I thought about QAnon too. Turns out, there’s a boatload of morons out there. I have extended relatives that were QAnon fools, and are now flat earther fools.

Attacking the source of the information is so common these days that most people mistake that for a good argument.

Doesn’t help that the video they’re all cheering over is a computer rending (presumably being pieced together from real time telemetry data being received). Gives the layperson the idea that the whole thing is being faked.

Wondering how Russians feel about the success of Chandrayaan-3 after the failure with their Luna 25.

"Glorious Russian probe came second, decadent Indian probe came second-last"

(I vaguely remember there was a headline along those lines about a 2-way athletics event between the USSR and the USA)

The crash of Luna 25 disheartens me as an engineer, representing a substantial loss of effort and work. However, I'm pleased with Chandrayaan-3's success.

Russia has a wonderful space program with ability to reliably go to space and are one of the biggest contributors to ISS.

Setbacks happen, but I am sure that doesn't change how they feel about Chandrayaan-3

Sh*t happens.

What else?

The global south reaches the lunar south.

Good stuff.

I love to see it! Great work and congrats to the team!

I find this party crazy:

Britain is set to boost aid to India by 70 per cent, it has emerged, just days after the country launched a rocket into space. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which distributes aid, sent India £33.4 million in aid cash in 2022/23. But the FCDO’s annual report, published this week, reveals that the total is set to rise to £57 million in 2024/25. This will be topped up by an as-yet-unknown amount from the business department, which usually gives more than £10 million.

Why send aid to a country with a space program?

Britain is just trying to give back what they had taken

probably more like greasing wheels to enable business

Having a space program isn't incompatible with needing aid. You can definitely make arguments about where money is being invested, of course. But you can also make arguments that Britain probably owes India a lot more than the current aid levels, so I think there's some real nuance here that probably isn't captured by HN comments.

Britain doesn't give aid to the Indian government. It gives aid to various NGOs that work there.

The amount is really measly (a couple of million GBP per year). I came across this calculation that ISRO earned something like 330M GBP over the past 9 years from it's 3rd party satellite launches.

This is a question we Indians have been asking too. We also don't see the need for this in the first place.

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