hotsauce writes "NASA administrator Griffin on a visit to Indian space facilities in Bangalore has signed an agreement to explore the moon with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This agreement will see NASA instruments on a 2008 Indian moon mission, and further cooperation is being explored. An Indian paper has a different take on the visit. Interesting answer by Griffin on NASA outsourcing to ISRO."
Since most people won't bother to read TFA to get the answer to the tease:
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm enabling bad behavior, but slashdot needs all the help it can get.)
Since most people won't bother to read TFA to get the answer to the tease:
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
That sounds like the mantra just before they officially announce 'well yeah, they are so cheap we will start outsourcing our engineers'. Now just how long before congress and the president is outsourced to india?;)
If the goal is "on the cheap", there are much better solutions.
1) Put off the landing date to give tech a chance to advance further; there are a number of interesting techs on the horizon. 2a) Cancel the CEV; launch astronauts on Shenzhou and Soyuz. OR 2b) Finish the CEV, but with a disposable or minimally reusable design, launched atop an EELV to reduce development costs. 3) Complete the DART program to eliminate the need for shuttle-delivered ISS components. 4) Reduce manned spaceflight. 5) Funnel the savings into many launch cost-reduction programs at once. Possibilities: 5a) Scramjets 5b) HEDM fuels (cubane compounds, nitrogen rings, solid ozone grains, etc) 5c) Cryogenic solids/hybrids 5d) OTRAG-style vehicles 5e) Nuclear thermal propulsion 5f) Materials tech (cheaper superalloy production methods, cheaper/stronger carbon structures, better linings, etc; especially important for reusables) 5g) General engine tech (there's always exotic engines like aerospikes, but I was thinking more along the lines of flometrics-style pumps, simpler turbopump designs, better self-contained hydraulics, better sensors, etc) 6) Also funnel the savings into in-space cost reduction tech: 6a) In-space assembly. 6b) Tether reboost 6c) Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and associated high energy density nuclear power plants 6d) Orbital tugs (rocket powered or ion powered) 6e) Solar power tech (to reduce mass and increase power) 6f) Exotic propulsion methods - antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion, nuclear saltwater rockets, etc. 6g) Lots of other miscellaneous craft tech that I don't want to have to take the time to enumerate.;)
Only after several generations of the smaller projects and one or two generations of the larger projects do you actually work on a vehicle that you plan to use as a workhorse and take a moonshot. By cutting back on the big capital expenses (the manned exploration program), you free up funds to take several technological routes at once, so you can pick the winner.
Newkyuler power in space? Good god man, you'll kill us all! If the thing blows up or de-orbits, that amount of newkyuler participles could, uh, well I don't really know but I'm going to go with "reduce the planet to a glassy sphere." Won't someone think of the children? You can't hug a children with radioactive satellites.
First off, I agree that it's not politically viable. I'm just talking technology and economics.
We can't launch the CEV on an EELV; man-rating any of those vehicles would be a nightmare.
It'd be nothing compared to the difficulties they're having trying to get a working CEV design using SRBs. Cut the mission scope to be nothing more than ISS, cut the anticipated lifespan, and you have a much simpler engineering task.
not only is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion going to cost billions of dollars and take years to finish
True, at least in the case of a full-scale craft based on it. Hundreds of millions to the low billions for research (NERVA did most of it for us), and upper tens of millions per engine.
but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it,
Way out of the ballpark. NERVA-2 (the spacecraft) was expected to cost 266m$ per 870k kg rocket in 1985 dollars (perhaps 400m$ today).
Sheesh, that's ANOTHER $5 billion
Um, no. The entire JIMO probe was slated to cost 400m$, which included a gas-cooled nuclear reactor.
and if we're successful, we'll have the largest ever nuclear protest group at the launch site...ASSUMING that we can get launch approval!
As stated, I deliberately ignored political consideration and approached only from a technological and economic standpoint. However, that's not really true. While they're popular to pillory, the Cassini protests were pretty darn small. Nuclear thermal propulsion might get a higher political profile, but a gas-cooled electricity-generating reactor won't.
"Antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion"?!?!?! What are you smoking? If we have problems launching something like New Frontiers, which had an RTG on it, how are we going to launch the most dangerous thing known to mankind?
Okay, now you're off the deep end here. Do you know what *catalyzed* means? The amount of antimatter is miniscule. We simply cannot affordably produce (nor trap) enough antimatter with current technology to produce a pure antimatter thruster. Antimatter *catalyzed* microfission/microfusion uses energetically irrelevant amounts of antimatter to trigger fission or fusion reactions in microscopic specs of fuel.
I doubt that there's a workable science bench microfission...
Google it. I'm not here to teach you Advanced Propulsion Concepts 101.
and even if there were, it's got to fit on a conventional launch vehicle to get into space.
Penning trap + pellet injector + antimatter injector + bell nozzle + pellet tank = antimatter catalyzed microfission/microfusion rocket. Which component, may I ask, are you picturing as being huge/heavy?
I'm almost surprised that you didn't rail against HEDM, cryogenic solids/hybrids, OTRAG, or any of the other things I mentioned.
Because Japan was never ruled by greedy idiots (British and Muslims). Because India was dumb enough not to invest in its own military and modernization.
Those who give stupid comparisions need to understand that there still are homeless and starving population in US of A and that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The Japanese were way ahead of Indians in many respects. Singular language and religion for the most part, with general homogeneity. The Indians have a fragmented culture - hundred of subdialects, subsects of religion that are well nigh incompatible with one another. Indians and Africans are very interesting to me, because most people see them from the outside as one monolithic culture, but they are an amalgam of dozens, hundreds of cultures. They get along imperfectly because they are different. This is mi
Poor economic policies. It's easy to call them poor in hindsight, but many countries thought them a good idea at the time (witness the Soviets, with otherwise very impressive achievements). Also, these policies were born out of fear--India had been colonized by a company [wikipedia.org], and was very concerned about foreign trade and private companies.
Since the 1990s, India has changed economic course, with good results [wikipedia.org]. The Indian government still believes that satelite communications forms an important part of basic inf
wow. how can such a (presumably) well educated crowd as slashdot remain so fricking ignorant about the world? whats with all these racist jokes? sometimes when i read slashdot's blatant racism, methinks that india is doing the world a huge favor by taking away valuable jobs from the hands of such ignorance.
first, you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india, despite having wrecked the indian economic potential far more surely than the americans did the japanese. you forget that india suffered 200 yrs of brutal colonial rule that left all but a tiny fragment of its ppl uneducated. you forget that under colonialism, indians weren't even allowed to run anything that resembled industry... it was illegal to do more than grow basic commodity crops for british consumption. when india got indepedence, it had an industrial revolution to catch up on. japan did not have to go through that -- they had industrial know-how all along.
the indian space research organization is single-mindedly dedicated to the development of technology that benefits civilians. you can read about that yourself. the moon-mission is the first gamble they are taking wherein they hope that a challenging outer-space mission will both boost their technological know-how and in turn help civilians in the future, and also ignite the minds of indian children regarding technology and space. yes, i understand that americans who were born before the 90s can't see anything outside the cold-war prism. but really, indians just want to push their technology further...
why did japan not invest into military and nuclear technology the way india has? simply b/c it has always been under the american military and nuclear umbrella. india, on the other had, was treated as a pariah by the US for not kowtowing to american foriegn policy. india has had to suffer embargos and sanctions for its right to defend itself. in contrast the obstentatiously peace-loving japanese could pretend that it didn't want to develop a strong military or militaristic technology, when in reality it has just counted on the US to protect it.
ok, enough. i'm not getting paid to educate this lot. nor is it entirely feasible.
You forget the real issue is that India can afford nukes and a space program. Unfortunately, it can't afford literacy or infrastructure development.
As for your misrepresentations about the Brits not permitting industrial development, you may want to have words with this company [tata.com] as well as others. When the Brits left, the Indians did not want major assistance programs from any western power and were prefering to flirt with the Soviets at the time.
You talk lines quite easily.. if you were Indian or know our history, you wouldn't generalise. It's hard to trust "western powers" after 200 years of colonial rule. Colonial rule started cause we (Indians) trusted the British in business in the first place.
About health and literacy programmes, yes it's unfortunate that our level of literacy is low. But it doesn't mean there isn't enthusiasm to help. Factors such as corruption have hurt this.. but we still have goals to make everyone literate. It is in fact a
When Japan was a 3rd-world nation, its government spent almost no money on space development. Rather, Tokyo plowed money into developing industry so that Japan could reach 1st-world status as quickly as possible.
You're as ignorant as you are anonymous. When was Japan a "third world nation"? That refers to a country with no industrial infrastructure. Japan hasn't been in that category since 1868, when they were forced to give up isolationism and modernize. They've been an industrial nation ever since. Perhaps you're thinking of the period right after WW II, when they were recovering from the destruction of their industrial centers. But even then, they hardly resembled a "third world" nation: they were still an industrial economy, albeit a badly damaged one.
By contrast, the Indian government wastes huge sums of money on space exploration and nuclear-weapons development. Meanwhile, the majority of Indians live in squalor.
Well, I'm not going to endorse nuclear weapons in India or anywhere else. But if you think that spending money on technological developement has no impact on India's poor, you're as ignorant of economics as you are of history. In order to take better care of its people, India has to grow its economy, and to do that, they need to invest in intellectual capital. They've been very successful at that, as a lot of Americans who've seen their jobs taken over by Indians will tell you.
"Why did Japan succeed but India fail?" I think comparision between India and Japan is wrong. Japan was fighting the world during WWII i.e. it was a world power, India at the time was coming out of a British rule that had slaved it.
All Japan really had to do is recover from WWII and the nukes. India had to start from scratch. Its only been 55 odd years or so since British rule ended in India. 55 Years is not a lot of time for a country to get freedom and stand on its feat.
Closest I would compare here is that Japan has succeeded and India is still writing its exam, judgement is still out.
There is a reason to why everyone is worried about outsourcing to India. This is also where NASA can learn from India. Budget for ISRO is nothing compared to that of NASA, nonetheless ISRO is in a select class of organization that has managed to launch a one ton plus satellite into orbit.
This is where NASA has most to gain, getting things done for lesser costs. Further, no single event except for wars have helped technology as much as NASA's Man on the Moon mission.
ISRO's exploration of the moon has similar objectives as well.
Not to mention, India's budget allocations for space exploration is miniscule compared to, not just imperial Japan's war-budget, but also to India's own spending on poverty alleviation. Perhaps not compared to primary education or healthcare in some parts, but hey, you weren't complaining about the state of schools in Bastar region were you?
ISRO Chairman: "We (ISRO and NASA) would like to see how best we can avoid duplication of efforts, especially in areas like earth observation and space sciences."
It sounds great, but it can also be seen as piggybacking on NASA's technology.
So what does NASA stand to benefit? To prove that they did land on the moon?
Under an accord between the countries' space agencies, India's first unmanned lunar mission will carry two scientific payloads from the US agency, Nasa.
ISRO's mission will carry payloads for NASA. It is piggybacking [wikipedia.org] in a literal sense, but the other way around.
The summary author would have been more correct in linking to the following story rather than attempting to make commentary by selecting the link they did: http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14200860 [sify.com]
It's not "another take" they link to, but rather "another story". Related, yes, but lets try a little harder (yes, it's slashdot, etc, etc but it doesn't hurt to try)
I purposely worded the phrase "another take on the/visit/" and not "another take on the story" because I found it interesting that while the BBC thought Griffin's visit important for the moon exploration cooperation, Sify (and others) thought the visit important as a sanctions ender.
I did see the link to the Sify story that reported on the MOU (it's clearly in the story I linked to), but thought the end of (most) sanctions to be an important story, too.
Since progress in this field is really beneficial to all of humanity, it's really good to see more countries joining forces to move progress along. I think in the long run privitization of the space industry is the way to go, but until that industry takes off a world wide coalition to push things forward might be our best bet for progress.
Yes, but the end results are still the same. If we can do more with the resources we have this way, then there are tangible benifits to the field. That's the whole point of countries teaming up like this.
United we rise, divided we... stretch our budget a little thinner to rise.
I think that, when they talk about lifting sanctions on "Indian space units", they mean relaxing/removing the sanctions imposed on high-tech exports to India.
1998 was when the U.S. flipped out over India's nuclear tests.
This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.
My My! This is truly a stunning accomplishment by India, to see its Space Program (by far, the most advanced amongst developing countries, and very favorably comparable to even the Japanese program), recognized so well by NASA. This is truly a coming of age for a very important country in the world, and I have to say, Hats off to the Indians -- they are making their rightful claim to being one of the most important nations in the world.
India has been courted by Presidents of both parties in America, and counts a full 1/3 of Congress in the India Caucus. That speaks volumes for how important India is to our American interests. Then there's the obvious close ties India has to Europe, and especially Britain. American foreign policy interests are also greatly helped by a country that is the world's largest democracy in a rather un-democratic neighborhood, and has very good relations with Israel, also in a neighborhood where Israel has few friends.
The cold war relations between America and India were truly a mistake, and a lost opportunities for both our countries, and I'm glad to see the US finally form the strong bonds with a country that will necessarily be one of the most important in the world in the coming years.
Years of propping up dictators in Africa and Pakistan have done us no good, and have only bred festering flash-points. It's time we gave some serious thought to a relataionship that has and will continue to produce excellent dividends for both parties.
"New Delhi, we have a problem."
"Thank you for calling Mission Control. May I be having your name, address, and current software version please?" "The software has locked us out. We need you to make a course correction in exactly 20 seconds!"
"Certainly sir. If I could just be having your license number please." "License number?! Just fire thrusters 2 and 3 for 4.5 seconds on my mark!"
"You're Mark? Thank you for giving me your name, but I am needing your license code too please." "Our license number is going to be 3-D-E-A-D-G-U-Y-S if you don't fire the thrusters in--5 seconds!"
"If this is an emergency request, please be giving me your express service code." "Express... Hey Buzz, crack the main hatch open for 5 seconds on my mark... NOW! We'll have to hope this works."
"I'm sorry sir, but it appears you have voided your warranty. Please be having a nice day."[click]
Racist?! For a simulated accent imitation? Would I be a racist if I imitated a Newfie accent? Or a Southern accent? How about Cockney or Scots?
I read a tech support horror story from the customer's point of view once where the support tech had such a heavy accent that the customer could not understand what he was saying. The customer asked to speak to someone else. The supervisor called him a racist and hung up on him, even though he had made no other comment than "I cannot understand what this technician is saying."
You, sir, are a knee-jerk reactionary. People talk differently. People think differently. Misunderstandings between people with different dialects, and different thought patterns, are funny. They have been since Much Ado About Nothing, and most likely long before that.
Do you complain about every comedian who makes a culture-oriented joke? Must keep you busy, because that's pretty much all of them.
Well, there are several problems with this concept of the "minimum miss distance" that bug me analytically:
1. The current nominal miss distance is 33LD, with a mimium miss distance of.04LD. When two estimates are so darn far apart, it makes it difficult to have any faith in their estimations. It's like saying, "between 4 and 33 million people will die of the bird flu". Some of the larger parts have been calculated more accurately, but this one has not been updated in over a week.
Umm... actually, that'd be more like saying "between 4 and 3300 people will die of the bird flu.". Nice try though. I think those boys at NASA know a bit more about math than you do. They don't want to be hit with a comet either.
Your analytics leave a bit to be desired. I think you're more into fearmongering with pseudo-science.
FYI: Roche limit does not apply for three reasons first the fragment is probably held together by chemical bonds not gravity and second on a near miss there is little time for such effects to take place. (Yes over time a glass of water will evaporate in a low humidity room but it take more than a few min for that to be significant.) And finally even where the fragment to break apart each fragment would continue more or less on the same path which would cause it to miss the earth.
As to why you ignore the earth's gravity in all but the closest near miss: With a V relative of 15km(km/s) and a distance of 15,360 KM the object is being accelerated by a force of (12,756.3/(12,756.3+15,360)) *.0098km/s/s = 0.00445km/s/s and that's tangential to it's path but it's passing the earth at that point so it makes little difference. Steeping back to 30,000 KM the object is accelerating at.00111km/s but most of that vector is not pulling the asteroid into a collision course. You can think of it as a large vector along it's path and a much smaller vector pulling it into a collision course. The further out you go the smaller the net force and the smaller the fraction that's pulling the object into a collision course.
Earth's gravity is important when you want to know how the object is being deflected but it does little to alter the probability of impact for objects with a high relative velocity.
PS: Feel free to calculate the two vectors at 30,000KM and 60,000KM on a near miss. (Now with line breaks...)
The minimum shown there is based on a three-sigma variance - there's only an 0.03% chance the comet fragment will come closer than that. So, one in ten thousand. Don't lose any sleep over it.
The helpdesk people will speak in heavily US-accented Hindi and claim there names are "Habib", to give them the full helpdesk experience we've been getting for years.
Flying carpets come out of Persian or Arab folklore, not Indian. I know you think they're all the same, but you're just displaying your typical Western ignorance, as are the moderators that modded you funny.
Your joke is equivalent to if NASA decided to work with the French Space Program and I made some jokes about German stereotypes (all the astronauts will have to eat sauerkraut, etc). It doesn't make any sense, and I doubt it would be modded funny.
Please re-parse that sentence. You assumed it meant that Western people are typically ignorant. A second interpretation could be that GP is displaying a specific type of ignorance, one that is typical to Western people, namely, in the area of foreign cultures. I move that he's quite right.
Of course, to them [NASA] it probably is a joke, since they've already been there.
A surprising number of people are expressing this sentiment. NASA "has already been there" with much older equipment, most of which was simply geared to keep humans alive. This mission gives the opportunity to do real science with modern equipment, and answer new questions, for instance Smart 1's survey of surface elements to confirm theories about the origin of the moon.
Can you hear me now? (Score:5, Funny)
And you thought the latency on calls to Dell's help desk was bad now...
Griffin's answer (Score:5, Informative)
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm enabling bad behavior, but slashdot needs all the help it can get.)
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:3, Funny)
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
That sounds like the mantra just before they officially announce 'well yeah, they are so cheap we will start outsourcing our engineers'. Now just how long before congress and the president is outsourced to india?
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:2)
Now just how long before congress and the president is outsourced to india?
It can't be too far off, you've been outsourcing your comedy from Canada for years.
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:2)
This is just more evidence that outsourcing, while it may seem appealing at first, just doesn't work over time.
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Put off the landing date to give tech a chance to advance further; there are a number of interesting techs on the horizon.
2a) Cancel the CEV; launch astronauts on Shenzhou and Soyuz.
OR
2b) Finish the CEV, but with a disposable or minimally reusable design, launched atop an EELV to reduce development costs.
3) Complete the DART program to eliminate the need for shuttle-delivered ISS components.
4) Reduce manned spaceflight.
5) Funnel the savings into many launch cost-reduction programs at once. Possibilities:
5a) Scramjets
5b) HEDM fuels (cubane compounds, nitrogen rings, solid ozone grains, etc)
5c) Cryogenic solids/hybrids
5d) OTRAG-style vehicles
5e) Nuclear thermal propulsion
5f) Materials tech (cheaper superalloy production methods, cheaper/stronger carbon structures, better linings, etc; especially important for reusables)
5g) General engine tech (there's always exotic engines like aerospikes, but I was thinking more along the lines of flometrics-style pumps, simpler turbopump designs, better self-contained hydraulics, better sensors, etc)
6) Also funnel the savings into in-space cost reduction tech:
6a) In-space assembly.
6b) Tether reboost
6c) Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and associated high energy density nuclear power plants
6d) Orbital tugs (rocket powered or ion powered)
6e) Solar power tech (to reduce mass and increase power)
6f) Exotic propulsion methods - antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion, nuclear saltwater rockets, etc.
6g) Lots of other miscellaneous craft tech that I don't want to have to take the time to enumerate.
Only after several generations of the smaller projects and one or two generations of the larger projects do you actually work on a vehicle that you plan to use as a workhorse and take a moonshot. By cutting back on the big capital expenses (the manned exploration program), you free up funds to take several technological routes at once, so you can pick the winner.
Parent
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't launch the CEV on an EELV; man-rating any of those vehicles would be a nightmare.
It'd be nothing compared to the difficulties they're having trying to get a working CEV design using SRBs. Cut the mission scope to be nothing more than ISS, cut the anticipated lifespan, and you have a much simpler engineering task.
not only is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion going to cost billions of dollars and take years to finish
True, at least in the case of a full-scale craft based on it. Hundreds of millions to the low billions for research (NERVA did most of it for us), and upper tens of millions per engine.
but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it,
Way out of the ballpark. NERVA-2 (the spacecraft) was expected to cost 266m$ per 870k kg rocket in 1985 dollars (perhaps 400m$ today).
Sheesh, that's ANOTHER $5 billion
Um, no. The entire JIMO probe was slated to cost 400m$, which included a gas-cooled nuclear reactor.
and if we're successful, we'll have the largest ever nuclear protest group at the launch site...ASSUMING that we can get launch approval!
As stated, I deliberately ignored political consideration and approached only from a technological and economic standpoint. However, that's not really true. While they're popular to pillory, the Cassini protests were pretty darn small. Nuclear thermal propulsion might get a higher political profile, but a gas-cooled electricity-generating reactor won't.
"Antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion"?!?!?! What are you smoking? If we have problems launching something like New Frontiers, which had an RTG on it, how are we going to launch the most dangerous thing known to mankind?
Okay, now you're off the deep end here. Do you know what *catalyzed* means? The amount of antimatter is miniscule. We simply cannot affordably produce (nor trap) enough antimatter with current technology to produce a pure antimatter thruster. Antimatter *catalyzed* microfission/microfusion uses energetically irrelevant amounts of antimatter to trigger fission or fusion reactions in microscopic specs of fuel.
I doubt that there's a workable science bench microfission...
Google it. I'm not here to teach you Advanced Propulsion Concepts 101.
and even if there were, it's got to fit on a conventional launch vehicle to get into space.
Penning trap + pellet injector + antimatter injector + bell nozzle + pellet tank = antimatter catalyzed microfission/microfusion rocket. Which component, may I ask, are you picturing as being huge/heavy?
I'm almost surprised that you didn't rail against HEDM, cryogenic solids/hybrids, OTRAG, or any of the other things I mentioned.
Parent
Re:Griffin's answer (Score:4, Funny)
You mispelled 'Yesterday'.
Parent
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:3, Insightful)
Those who give stupid comparisions need to understand that there still are homeless and starving population in US of A and that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:3, Insightful)
The Japanese were way ahead of Indians in many respects. Singular language and religion for the most part, with general homogeneity. The Indians have a fragmented culture - hundred of subdialects, subsects of religion that are well nigh incompatible with one another. Indians and Africans are very interesting to me, because most people see them from the outside as one monolithic culture, but they are an amalgam of dozens, hundreds of cultures. They get along imperfectly because they are different. This is mi
Economic Policies (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the 1990s, India has changed economic course, with good results [wikipedia.org]. The Indian government still believes that satelite communications forms an important part of basic inf
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:5, Insightful)
wow. how can such a (presumably) well educated crowd as slashdot remain so fricking ignorant about the world? whats with all these racist jokes? sometimes when i read slashdot's blatant racism, methinks that india is doing the world a huge favor by taking away valuable jobs from the hands of such ignorance.
first, you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india, despite having wrecked the indian economic potential far more surely than the americans did the japanese. you forget that india suffered 200 yrs of brutal colonial rule that left all but a tiny fragment of its ppl uneducated. you forget that under colonialism, indians weren't even allowed to run anything that resembled industry... it was illegal to do more than grow basic commodity crops for british consumption. when india got indepedence, it had an industrial revolution to catch up on. japan did not have to go through that -- they had industrial know-how all along.
the indian space research organization is single-mindedly dedicated to the development of technology that benefits civilians. you can read about that yourself. the moon-mission is the first gamble they are taking wherein they hope that a challenging outer-space mission will both boost their technological know-how and in turn help civilians in the future, and also ignite the minds of indian children regarding technology and space. yes, i understand that americans who were born before the 90s can't see anything outside the cold-war prism. but really, indians just want to push their technology further...
why did japan not invest into military and nuclear technology the way india has? simply b/c it has always been under the american military and nuclear umbrella. india, on the other had, was treated as a pariah by the US for not kowtowing to american foriegn policy. india has had to suffer embargos and sanctions for its right to defend itself. in contrast the obstentatiously peace-loving japanese could pretend that it didn't want to develop a strong military or militaristic technology, when in reality it has just counted on the US to protect it.
ok, enough. i'm not getting paid to educate this lot. nor is it entirely feasible.
Parent
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:3, Interesting)
As for your misrepresentations about the Brits not permitting industrial development, you may want to have words with this company [tata.com] as well as others. When the Brits left, the Indians did not want major assistance programs from any western power and were prefering to flirt with the Soviets at the time.
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:3, Interesting)
It's hard to trust "western powers" after 200 years of colonial rule. Colonial rule started cause we (Indians) trusted the British in business in the first place.
About health and literacy programmes, yes it's unfortunate that our level of literacy is low. But it doesn't mean there isn't enthusiasm to help. Factors such as corruption have hurt this.. but we still have goals to make everyone literate. It is in fact a
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:5, Insightful)
I think comparision between India and Japan is wrong. Japan was fighting the world during WWII i.e. it was a world power, India at the time was coming out of a British rule that had slaved it.
All Japan really had to do is recover from WWII and the nukes. India had to start from scratch. Its only been 55 odd years or so since British rule ended in India. 55 Years is not a lot of time for a country to get freedom and stand on its feat.
Closest I would compare here is that Japan has succeeded and India is still writing its exam, judgement is still out.
There is a reason to why everyone is worried about outsourcing to India. This is also where NASA can learn from India. Budget for ISRO is nothing compared to that of NASA, nonetheless ISRO is in a select class of organization that has managed to launch a one ton plus satellite into orbit.
This is where NASA has most to gain, getting things done for lesser costs. Further, no single event except for wars have helped technology as much as NASA's Man on the Moon mission.
ISRO's exploration of the moon has similar objectives as well.
Parent
Re:Japan vs. India (Score:3, Informative)
Two Words (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Funny)
Two more: (Score:2)
Re:Two Words (Score:3, Funny)
Avoid duplication of efforts, or? (Score:2)
It sounds great, but it can also be seen as piggybacking on NASA's technology.
So what does NASA stand to benefit? To prove that they did land on the moon?
RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
ISRO's mission will carry payloads for NASA. It is piggybacking [wikipedia.org] in a literal sense, but the other way around.
Not quite (Score:5, Informative)
It's not "another take" they link to, but rather "another story". Related, yes, but lets try a little harder (yes, it's slashdot, etc, etc but it doesn't hurt to try)
Summary Author Here (Score:2)
I did see the link to the Sify story that reported on the MOU (it's clearly in the story I linked to), but thought the end of (most) sanctions to be an important story, too.
For Mankind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It has little to do with altruism. (Score:2)
United we rise, divided we... stretch our budget a little thinner to rise.
And so it begins... (Score:2, Funny)
Cowboys and Indians on the Moon, Oh my! (Score:2)
Sounds like an Irwin Allen [wikipedia.org] sci-fi series.
Re:Cowboys and Indians on the Moon, Oh my! (Score:2)
Indian Space Units (Score:4, Informative)
1998 was when the U.S. flipped out over India's nuclear tests.
So finally (Score:2, Troll)
Thank you! Come Again.
The target is China, not the moon (Score:5, Insightful)
Stunning accomplishments by India (Score:4, Interesting)
India has been courted by Presidents of both parties in America, and counts a full 1/3 of Congress in the India Caucus. That speaks volumes for how important India is to our American interests. Then there's the obvious close ties India has to Europe, and especially Britain. American foreign policy interests are also greatly helped by a country that is the world's largest democracy in a rather un-democratic neighborhood, and has very good relations with Israel, also in a neighborhood where Israel has few friends.
The cold war relations between America and India were truly a mistake, and a lost opportunities for both our countries, and I'm glad to see the US finally form the strong bonds with a country that will necessarily be one of the most important in the world in the coming years.
Years of propping up dictators in Africa and Pakistan have done us no good, and have only bred festering flash-points. It's time we gave some serious thought to a relataionship that has and will continue to produce excellent dividends for both parties.
Conversation from the mission... (Score:5, Funny)
...received from my Crystal Ball(TM):
"New Delhi, we have a problem."
"Thank you for calling Mission Control. May I be having your name, address, and current software version please?"
"The software has locked us out. We need you to make a course correction in exactly 20 seconds!"
"Certainly sir. If I could just be having your license number please."
"License number?! Just fire thrusters 2 and 3 for 4.5 seconds on my mark!"
"You're Mark? Thank you for giving me your name, but I am needing your license code too please."
"Our license number is going to be 3-D-E-A-D-G-U-Y-S if you don't fire the thrusters in--5 seconds!"
"If this is an emergency request, please be giving me your express service code."
"Express... Hey Buzz, crack the main hatch open for 5 seconds on my mark... NOW! We'll have to hope this works."
"I'm sorry sir, but it appears you have voided your warranty. Please be having a nice day."[click]
Re:Conversation from the mission... (Score:4, Insightful)
Racist?! For a simulated accent imitation? Would I be a racist if I imitated a Newfie accent? Or a Southern accent? How about Cockney or Scots?
I read a tech support horror story from the customer's point of view once where the support tech had such a heavy accent that the customer could not understand what he was saying. The customer asked to speak to someone else. The supervisor called him a racist and hung up on him, even though he had made no other comment than "I cannot understand what this technician is saying."
You, sir, are a knee-jerk reactionary. People talk differently. People think differently. Misunderstandings between people with different dialects, and different thought patterns, are funny. They have been since Much Ado About Nothing, and most likely long before that.
Do you complain about every comedian who makes a culture-oriented joke? Must keep you busy, because that's pretty much all of them.
Parent
Re:This Assumes That We're All Still Here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Minimum Miss Distance, etc. (Score:2)
1. The current nominal miss distance is 33LD, with a mimium miss distance of .04LD. When two estimates are so darn far apart, it makes it difficult to have any faith in their estimations. It's like saying, "between 4 and 33 million people will die of the bird flu". Some of the larger parts have been calculated more accurately, but this one has not been updated in over a week.
2. The nominal miss d
Re:Minimum Miss Distance, etc. (Score:2)
Your analytics leave a bit to be desired. I think you're more into fearmongering with pseudo-science.
Re:Minimum Miss Distance, etc. (Score:5, Informative)
As to why you ignore the earth's gravity in all but the closest near miss: With a V relative of 15km(km/s) and a distance of 15,360 KM the object is being accelerated by a force of (12,756.3/(12,756.3+15,360)) *
Earth's gravity is important when you want to know how the object is being deflected but it does little to alter the probability of impact for objects with a high relative velocity.
PS: Feel free to calculate the two vectors at 30,000KM and 60,000KM on a near miss.
(Now with line breaks...)
Parent
Re:This Assumes That We're All Still Here... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:This Assumes That We're All Still Here... (Score:2)
Re:This Assumes That We're All Still Here... (Score:2)
Re:In related news, (Score:2)
Re:In related news, (Score:2)
Re:NASA is aware... (Score:3, Informative)
Flying carpets come out of Persian or Arab folklore, not Indian. I know you think they're all the same, but you're just displaying your typical Western ignorance, as are the moderators that modded you funny.
Your joke is equivalent to if NASA decided to work with the French Space Program and I made some jokes about German stereotypes (all the astronauts will have to eat sauerkraut, etc). It doesn't make any sense, and I doubt it would be modded funny.
Re:NASA is aware... (Score:5, Interesting)
Typical Western ignorance?!?!?!!?
As you type your screed on a digital computer, and send it over the internet with satellite linkups.
I'll say one thing: At least Western ignorance is rather inventive.
Parent
Re:NASA is aware... (Score:3, Insightful)
Already Been There (Score:4, Insightful)
A surprising number of people are expressing this sentiment. NASA "has already been there" with much older equipment, most of which was simply geared to keep humans alive. This mission gives the opportunity to do real science with modern equipment, and answer new questions, for instance Smart 1's survey of surface elements to confirm theories about the origin of the moon.
Parent