India's Successful Commercial Satellite Launch 168
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday India successfully launched an Italian astronomical satellite. A BBC article (view video clip) notes that the launch grants India membership in the exclusive group of nations that can sustain commercial satellite launches. India's launch vehicle has less overall capacity than the competition — up to 1,500 kg to orbit — but the country plans to sweep the low end of the market by offering the lowest cost per launched kilogram for smaller payloads."
Re:Small payloads? (Score:5, Informative)
PSLV- lite (Score:2, Informative)
It is a good job, but launching rockets is not rocket science. One dark possibility is that they are having problems with the six strap on booster configuration and are trying to salvage a reduced capacity vehicle from the detritus of a failed project. I remember the crash of ASLV (a fore runner of PSLV, two strap on booster on their basic SLV-3). My prof was in the post martem committee and was ranting on and on about how dumb their simulation of booster rocket was. "Thrust is 100% for 45 seconds and 0% after that? Why didn't the stupid hacks code up the table of thrust vs time from the static firing?" or something along those lines.
Re:Next superpowers... (Score:3, Informative)
Old news (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Centre of solar system (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention that the top orbital mechanics professor in my department is an Italian, and the Italian grad students I've gotten to work with have been wonderful. Plus of course Galileo himself was Italian as well, even if his government and church weren't the most supportive.
Re:But are they competitive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:list please? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Next superpowers... (Score:4, Informative)
Compare that with 50.4 million votes for Bush on his first term, and 62 million votes on his second term, to measure the strength of Brazilian democracy, taking in account that, differently from U.S.A, not only there are more than 2 effective parties in Brazil but any candidate from any party appears equally on the ballots in the whole federal territory.
Add that to a nationwide deployed electronic voting system (even in the middle of the amazon forest there is electronic voting) that really works, and you can understand how much Brazilian people trust the electoral process there, unlike U.S.A.
I cannot speak for India (that happen to be a democracy too, afaik), but at least Brazil needs no help from U.S. Actually, the more far away U.S. gets from Latin America democracies, the better (go lookup "Operation Condor" and "Escuela de las americas" to understand how U.S. undermine Latin American democracies in the past).