After Successful Launch, India's Mars Orbiter Is On Its Way 166
neo12 writes "India has successfully launched a spacecraft to the Red Planet — with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to reach Mars."
As our previous mention of the launch notes, getting to Mars by rocket is a long haul: if all goes well, it will be about 10 months until Mangalyaan reaches orbit.
Re:0.37% of India's total budget (Score:5, Informative)
Poor India with it's 1.842 trillion USD GDP. It's a G20 member with the 9 largest economy in the world, ffs.
Re:0.37% of India's total budget (Score:5, Informative)
Are you disingenuous on purpose? 1.8 trillion isn't exactly a huge GDP, much less for a nation the size of India. Let's look at a few examples
___GDP (USD)...population...per-capita GDP
US.......15.68T......313M.....$49,965
UK.........2.44T.......63M.....$38,514
China.....8.23T...1,351M.......$6,091
Nigeria....262b......168M......$1,555
India......1.82T...1,237M......$1,489
So basically India has an economy the size of Brasil, spread across 6x as many people, or alternately a population the size of China, but with 4x less money. I'd call that pretty poor unless you're using Africa as your measuring stick.
Re:0.37% of India's total budget (Score:5, Informative)
it tells Pakistan
You don't need a Mars misson for that. All of India's (and China's, too) neighbours are very well aware that the space-faring nations already have the abillity to drop anything they please on them.
No, this mission is an advertising campaign to promote India's already successful space launch industries. The fact that this mission is so much cheaper (if not yet successful: a major factor in the cost of american missions is employing all those 1,000's of staff at western rates of pay. And if the mission does make it to Mars, and continues to run to well past it's planned failure date then the mission just costs more) is part of the "we can launch your satellites AND we have much lower costs" message that the world will hear and take note of.
It might even do some science, too.
Re:Good Job, But... (Score:4, Informative)
Because most of the "real firsts" were done by Russia and the U.S. a long time ago. And you've got to start somewhere.
Most of the firsts were done by the Soviets.
First artificial satellite.
First living thing in space.
First astronaut.
First man to orbit the earth.
First space walk.
First woman in space.
First space station.
Plenty of broken records for long duration in space too.
Re:0.37% of India's total budget (Score:5, Informative)
India has used satellites to improve weather and crop forecasting, fisheries management, and just plain ol' land use data gathering and other metrics. Their space program largely serves their people by making government and commerce more productive and efficient.
This mission will further develop their technical capabilities, and if it leads to more commercial paid-for launches, they will probably piggyback their own birds on these, saving more money and letting India further exploit space technology to their benefit.
There may be more examples. I just hit the easy ones.