ISRO Successfully Launches Satellite Into Geostationary Orbit 89
vasanth writes: Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) on Thursday cleared all doubts on its cryogenic capabilities, successfully launching the Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-D6), placing GSAT-6, a 2,117kg communication satellite in orbit. The GSLV D-6 is the second consecutive successful launch of the GSLV series with indigenous cryogenic upper stage. ISRO had on January 5, 2014 launched GSLV D-5, after a similar attempt failed in 2010. For the country, ISRO perfecting the cryogenic engine technology is crucial, as precious foreign exchange can be saved by launching communication satellites on its own. Currently ISRO flies its heavy communication satellites by European space agency Ariane. ISRO has already perfected its Polar Launching Vehicle for launching lighter satellites, with decades of success stories. It has already put 45 foreign satellites of 9 nations into orbit. ISRO is to put 9 satellites in space using the PSLV launcher for the United States in 2015-2016.
Hey India! (Score:1, Insightful)
Welcome to the 1960s! Now work on municipal drinking water and sewer systems for your citizens instead of playing Space Cadet, mkay?
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Nice to see the first sniggering comment! I am sure you won't be the only one. I don't know whether they will fix the municipal drinking water, but they will eat the lunch of space launching business from most countries for sure if they maintain the same consistency on GSLV with which they executed PSLV program.
So yeah, enjoy your sarcastic laugh, taunts and potshots...Coz thats what will remain with you while they will do good business.
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What aid? But yes we will give you aid because very soon you will need it. Desperately.
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> I'm sure one day, as a culture, they'll offer some insight no one has considered.
What one day? The very number system we are using, y'know, the decimal number system, with its zero and all, is Indian... not Indo-Arabic, just Indian. Without the decimal system, there wouldn't be any advanced math, not with the Roman numerals. Is that insight enough?
> It still appears that the worst thing India ever did in its bubbling history was to say "good by" to Alexander's Army.
"good by"(sic)? Alexander does not
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Americans have been using that "superior rocket technology" on the 4th of July; for a long time.
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Yes, after the British used the said Indian rockets on US in the War of 1812, so much so that the event was recorded in its national anthem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
PS: I should have said 215 years ago.
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> Americans have been using that "superior rocket technology" on the 4th of July; for a long time.
Meh, US is very young. "long time" can only mean so much for it. India's firework festival is called Diwali.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It goes back at least a couple of millennia.
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Must be :-). Despite having a much lower income, Indians splurge nearly the same amount on Fireworks on Diwali as Americans do on the 4th of July... nearly a Billion dollars per year, per country, with the Indian figure rapidly climbing as the economy improves. Wonder how much China burns through, since that is another fireworks culture.
Re: Hey India! (Score:5, Informative)
You need to put that in context of the size of India's economy. Most of that "aid" is about buying influence via NGOs. India says that it does NOT want aid and calls it "peanuts".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
"Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money"
"We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development spending."
US aid to India is even smaller - about a third to a sixth.
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India is now a $8 Trillion economy.. India also gives billions in aid to other countries. Those few billions in the chart are peanuts and nobody will care if it stopped.
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nobody will care if it stopped.
Sure some people do care - those white skinned math-challenged "first world" whiners who think few billions of "their" charity is really saving the third world. They will lose one major gloat-point that makes them feel smug.
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Yes, as other comments elsewhere ( expand to see comments with 0 mod points , if you really care learn more and are not merely trolling) have pointed out, "millions of pounds" are inconsequential for a country the size of India. Neither does India (i.e. Indian govt.) want it , again as others have pointed out with citations.
Nice straw man there, but any govt including Indian does not work on single point agendas. There have been lots of advancement since many people with names like "Ian" left the country f
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Some problems with your analogy... a porsche is $800/month or $26/day. Feeding your kid is say, $20/day. That means a porsche is worth 130% of what feeding a kid is. So a father who polishes his porsche and lets his one kid starve is indeed problematic.
In India, the space program is profitable, but let's ignore that for the sake of your argument and assume it doesn't have any income and only has expenses. The space agency costs $300m/yr or less than $1m/day. Feeding everyone costs $20b/day or $20,000m/
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> Actually India receives a lot of financial aid (Hundreds of millions of pounds every year)
"Hundreds of millions" is a "peanut" as the Indian finance minister put it and said India does not want it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
Millions are nothing in terms of national budgets. US aid of $91m to India (2014) is less than roughly 0.005% of India's GDP (>$2T nominal). Most of it is used to exert influence via NGOs, not actually help the poor. UK does more, but is equally inconsequential... and unwel
Re:Hey India! (Score:5, Insightful)
Was the world doing Mars missions in the 60s? India's space program makes money for the country. Think of it as one way to fund those municipal services you speak of. It was not done for bragging rights. India has already positioned itself as the outsourcing destination for satellite launches. The one capability it lacked was the launch of heavy satellites. That is fixed now and it can compete with European launch markets.
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Successful missions to Mars in the 1960's:
Mariner 4, flyby July 1965
Mariner 6, flyby July 1969
Mariner 7, flyby August 1969
and, not quite making it into the 60's, Mariner 9, entered Mars orbit November 1971
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Wally, is that you?
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Trajectory plot indicates it will do re-entry over Droughtfornia and land on your mommas soon to be re-possed by OnePercenterBank house. Time to get out of the basement porky !
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Hey, this is just India's first step in their eventual goal of establishing call centers on the moon.
Yo! Moo dude! Now it is appropriate. (Score:3, Funny)
Because they have all those sacred cows in the roads.
Congratulations India! (Score:3)
And if you can launch a satellite into geostationary, you can launch a MIRV'd ICBM against any really large country that might threaten you.
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Umm...if you can launch a satellite into LEO you can do the ICBM thing. Or even a FOBS. Doesn't take geostationary orbital capability.
Note that India has been capable of reaching LEO since 1980.
Re:Congratulations India! (Score:4, Informative)
No you can't, for the reason which the USA and USSR gave up on liquid fueled ICBMs as quickly as they could and never fielded cryogenic fueled ICBMs ('cryogenic' defined as using liquid hydrogen). A liquid fueled ICBM requires too much advance preparation to launch and so becomes the first target to be hit by the opposing power in a confrontation. The only practical ICBMs are solid fueled, but solid fueled rockets are too inefficient for practical launches to geostationary orbit. So launching to geostationary orbit has little to do with usable ICBM technology, at least for the propulsion part of it.
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A communication satellite is not a vanity project, you ignorant KKK retard. Third world countries are not "trying to pay" Europeans, they pay them for services rendered by Europeans or anybody else , like it happens everywhere where business transactions happen but carry on with your idiotic rants bcoz you think some furriners hurt your sense of entitlement by taking "your" jerrbs ...
India stopped receiving any aid money since the 90s as a government becuase it was so tiny as to be useless but gave cause f
Re:Indians. (Score:5, Informative)
> India was a fucking jungle before the white man colonized it
India had roughly 29% of world GDP before colonialism. It was 3% after colonialism ended. Without colonialism, India would have industrialized earlier, perhaps after Japan (which almost ended up in China's position with the Black Ship episode, but got its reprieve with US civil war).
> How far ahead has it gotten for the 60 years of independence?
Quite a bit actually. The development indices were quite stagnant while the British were in India. Every one of them shot up after they left. Obviously there is still ground to be covered.
> Have you stopped gang-raping your women already? No? How come?
Show me one statistic that says rape in India is higher per 100K, than it is in US or elsewhere. It isn't, even if you account for high under-reporting. The press had its fun highlighting anecdotes, but failed to make a scholarly case. Rape is a problem everywhere. The claim that India is a special case cannot *statistically* be made.
Re:Indians. (Score:5, Insightful)
> There was no 'GDP' before the advent of modern economy from the West.
You can say the same about History. That does not mean that we cannot look into the past beyond the origin of its current method.
There is an entire field of study, Quantitative Macroeconomic History, that estimates historical GDPs. Angus Madison did pioneering work in the area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
> Everyone was growing and eating their own food, including peasantry in India.
That's a rather naive understanding of history. Indians were trading with the West for millinea, with spices, gold and gem stones. That was the whole point behind the accidental, and even an unwanted discovery of Americas (seen as a block in the route for centuries) by Europe, because the Arabs blocked land trade routes.
Yes, everyone was growing their own food because shipping was not at all reliable for managing food on stormy sea lanes. But the ancient world was doing plenty of trading for lighter materials and luxuries.
> What 'statistic', if you look at 'statistics', India is lower than Sweden. Yeah, that Sweden, where a condom breaking during consensual sex is a 'rape'.
True. There is no uniform definition of rape, which makes comparisons difficult. Sweden definition is indeed absurd. And no, I am not arguing that it is better to be a woman in India than in Sweden. I am however arguing that the status of women in India is no different than women in countries with similar socio-economic development.
> In India rape isn't 'underreported', it is a part of the culture. Rape is not reported in the jungle, it is the way of life.
Hogwash. You are speaking from a superficial understanding based on press reports with little understanding of India. There is no codified cultural support for rape, apart from being a patriarchal society from still being an agrarian culture. If there was, Indians would not have raucously shut down the capital for weeks in response for a rape. That's the story. Not the rape. What is the strongest response of the US civil society for its worst rape case? The few rural bumpkins who rape in India are no more representative of India, than are gang bangers in ghettos representative of US.
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I say cut off their aid money, if they've got so much laying around to spend on this.
Time to put the begging bowl away guys.
$93M in 2013 – that's not really much. And you know what? India has been asking us – the US and Britain – to stop. They don't want it. They don't need it. India really is quite wealthy. Yes, there's a lot of poverty. That's what most people seem to want to see for some reason.
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India really is quite wealthy. Yes, there's a lot of poverty. That's what most people seem to want to see for some reason.
That's what people see both because there's more of it around to see, and because the rich-poor divide is even wider in India than it is in other nations. While many of the descendants of the Raj continue to live opulent lifestyles surrounded by servants, whole swaths of the Indian population lives in a degree of squalor and dirt which you don't even see in most developed nations.
The fact that there's a lot of money in India doesn't stop large portions of its population from living in abject poverty.
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India really is quite wealthy. Yes, there's a lot of poverty. That's what most people seem to want to see for some reason.
That's what people see both because there's more of it around to see, and because the rich-poor divide is even wider in India than it is in other nations. While many of the descendants of the Raj continue to live opulent lifestyles surrounded by servants, whole swaths of the Indian population lives in a degree of squalor and dirt which you don't even see in most developed nations.
The fact that there's a lot of money in India doesn't stop large portions of its population from living in abject poverty.
Obvious man is obvious. But I wasn't referring to the wealth of selected individuals. India's GDP and the money the government collects in taxes make it a fairly wealthy country by almost any measure.
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> because the rich-poor divide is even wider in India than it is in other nations
India's Gini index is the same as that of Switzerland & Canada and better than US & UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://data.worldbank.org/indi... [worldbank.org]
Argue with numbers please, not your prejudices and cliches.
Well done India (Score:5, Funny)
Certainly a great achievement (Score:2)
Yes, developing their launch abilities is a great technical achievement and source of national pride. But does anyone seriously believe it's cheaper for India to develop this than to pay to launch a few communications satellites. Someone will no doubt say that "in the long run" it's cheaper, but I'd like to see numbers, because at this point, with the number of competitors, I don't believe it.
Re:Certainly a great achievement (Score:4, Interesting)
India does not do its space program for pride reasons. Its control room is rather unglamorous. Its space program already turns a profit, as an outsourcing entity. I read during the Mars Orbiter news that ISRO can hire rocket scientists for as low as $12K (that's cheaper than Indian software engineers who work for multinationals in India, although as government jobs, they probably have better long-term benefits and job security). It can be a LOT cheaper for ISRO to develop a space program than it costs NASA. India has some unique properties. Its manufacturing is underdeveloped, but its knowledge economy is far more advanced than its per capita figures would normally allow it to be. ISRO is perhaps simply taking advantage of that.
> because at this point, with the number of competitors, I don't believe it.
There aren't that many competitors and India is already deep in the fray in the standard launch market (it is not a hypothetical). This vehicle allows it to enter the heavier launch market that eluded it so far. I can see India dominating the launch market to the same extent that it does with the software labor market... on cost propositions for routine, straight-forward work (its Mars mission was the cheapest inter-planetary mission ever - $70m). Comparing costs does not work.
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> although as government jobs, they probably have better long-term benefits and job security
That's true. My ex-boss worked in ISRO from 1990s to 2009. The pay is pretty good, especially since about 1998 onwards for a Masters degree in any engineering discipline. Not to mention nearly free housing and subsided food and either on premise schooling for your kids or very good scholarships depending on the city you are stationed. After working for few (5? 7?) years, you can get sabbatical to pursue speciali
Re:Certainly a great achievement (Score:4, Insightful)
It is quite easy to find per launch numbers. The GSLV MK 3 costs $36m per launch. At 5000 kg GTO payload, the competitors would be China's Long March 2-3-4, India's ULV, Russia's R-500 Proton, Japan's H-II, IIA & IIB, US's Atlas V, Europe's Ariane 5 and Ariane 6, US's Delta IV, China's Long March 5 and SpaceX's (US) Falcon Heavy. The ones current available, and their costs are Long March 2-3-4 (?), Zenit ($90m), UR-500 Proton ($100m). For the sake completeness, the remaining ones with much higher payload support, and their cost: H-II-IIA-IIB ($200m), Atlas V ($100m), Delta IV ($435m).
Someone else will have to run development costs (the GSLV MK3 costs $400m (the cryo engine was a real cost sink), not including the earlier versions and development cost of PSLV). But overall, it should be cheaper that outsourcing, especially when your costs are much lower than everyone else, and you can launch satellites for other countries.
Also keep in mind that, yesterday's launch is supposed to have unspecified military uses (probably just communications). It is not possible to outsource your military sats to other nations. Plus if it comes to it, you can claim part ownership of mars and moon (why do you think every country wants their flag on it). Plus, you will need most of the rocket tech for your missiles anyways. Add to this that your money doesnt end up in another country, and you are giving it to the people in the country (you will be consuming some of the top human resources in your country, and very tiny portion of the raw materials used in your country, but it is still a net benefit for you)
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It looks like they fulfilled the Requirements. Also, they pray to an elephant god, so that has to help.
There. Fixed that for you. Sort of. Hindus have several gods, only one of which is an elephant. There are also 150M+ Christians, and 125M+ Muslims living in India who don't pray to any Hindu gods.
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> There are also 150M+ Christians, and 125M+ Muslims living in India
You don't have the correct numbers. Its 177M Muslims and 27.8M Christians.
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CONGRATULATIONS (Score:2)
Delighted to hear of their success. The more parties that are up there, the more that space activities will become a pedestrian sort of thing that we need to consider in public budgets, instead of still sort of seeming to be treated like some 'luxury' item that can be cut whenever fat needs to be trimmed.
Little better than Ethiopia (Score:1)
Little better than Ethiopia
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ind... [dailymail.co.uk]