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India launches 20 satellites in single mission
- WWKong 10y agoYes, they will build toilets too. Just getting that out of the way.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't do this here.
- curiousgal 10y agoHis wording is off but he does raise a good point of discussion.
- mani04 10y agoI really don't think it is a good point of discussion in this context. The scientists who are working on these rocket launch missions are not in charge of administration of the towns and villages where the toilets need to be built.
- curiousgal 10y agoOf course they are not. But the merits of India's space program are a debate worth having in my opinion. All the other space programs (except for NK) were started when their nations were doing okay socially at least. Sure, the profits may be redirected to fixing those social issues but lives are being lost the longer they delay that.
- IndianAstronaut 10y agoIndians spend several times more money on Bollywood and Cricket than the space programs. Space programs are not what needs to be targeted for budgets.
- josephmx 10y agoI'm not sure you can compare cricket with government spending, unless the government massively donates to sport and movies?
- mindondrugs 10y agoThe Indian Goverment has a budget of Rs. 1541 Crores (£155,000,000~) for the Sports Department http://www.hindustantimes.com/union-budget/sports-ministry-gets-marginal-raise-in-the-union-budget-2016/story-rzObzoxvYWxUstZbjSqjoM.html http://www.hindustantimes.com/union-budget/sports-ministry-g... And the space program has a budget of Rs. 7,927 crore (£799,871,700) according to wikipedia. So to address your point, yeah India spends quite a bit on Sports, but no way near as much as their Space Program.
- iprateek 10y agoAnd the Government would spend Rs 221,246 crore on roads and railways alone. http://www.livemint.com/Politics/zdmiM68OZXnq2Kg5sMJESI/Budget-2016-Govt-to-spend-Rs218-trillion-on-roads-railway.html http://www.livemint.com/Politics/zdmiM68OZXnq2Kg5sMJESI/Budg...
- hvmonk 10y agoYeah, a totally irrelevant comment.
- kkarakk 10y agothe point being relevant to the news about the satellites how? people bringing up problems with developing countries infrastructure/politics in threads about their achievements has nothing to do with the achievements and everything to do with that pervasive feeling of us vs them
- jkot 10y agoAnd what do you want to discus? It will start just another flame-war. Indian program is pretty cost effective, and there is a good chance it will become profitable. And US has 44M people on food stamps ;-(
- hueving 10y ago>And US has 44M people on food stamps ;-( That's how social programs work. It wouldn't be working if they weren't giving them out to the lower distribution of the US income. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, that food stamps imply the country is poor? Would highlighting that the UK has 100% of its people on NHS also imply that their citizens are poor?
- jkot 10y agoEuropean countries used food stamps during WW2. It implies that country does not have enough food, if it has to ration its food supplies. I know it is social assistance, but it has really bad name. NHS is paid health insurance, sometimes pretty expensive, not much relevant.
- DrScump 10y agoYou are confusing rationing with (essentially) gifting. Ration stamps merely represented a limited ability to buy a resource in short supply. For example, if you had ration stamps for gasoline/petrol, you could buy up to whatever quantity you had stamps for -- you handed over the stamps and cash.
- nickserv 10y agoThe term "stamp" in this context is used to refer to a system of payment using a proof-of-purchase (the stamp). Another example, a postage stamp is evidence that you have paid for the delivery of your letter. Some countries use stamps to pay for government services like deeds or passports. You are confusing this with a ration system using stamps, which allows the purchase of a good, but does not actually pay for the goods.
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- dang 10y agoIt isn't a good point of discussion; it's a "classic flamewar topic" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) that leads to the same predictable, angry discussion every time it's invariably raised in stories about India, especially India's space program. We need the intellectual maturity as a community to resist such temptation and differentiate one topic (e.g., a good thing people are doing) from another (e.g. the worst known fact about those people). This is more important the more complex a system gets, and it's hard to imagine more complex systems than a country or more complex countries than India.
- WWKong 10y agoThanks. This is what I was trying to convey. Next time I will be more direct.
- eklavya 10y agoWhen it's a country you are talking about, you have to plan for centuries and not the next decade. Being myopic will only hurt. It's not like building toilets and launching satellites are an either/or. Besides launching satellites is a very profitable business for India. So why not?
- rickycook 10y agoi don't know. our own governments tend to think about the next 3-6 years; not even a decade. centuries? hah that's well beyond what is politically profitable
- WWKong 10y agoThat was exactly my point. Totally lost on HN. Every time we have, "India did x in tech", we get, "but they don't have toilets".
- witty_username 10y agoHow come the US hasn't eliminated homelessness before launching satellites? You don't have to fix every other problem in the world before doing something advanced.
- someonenice 10y agoMaybe the money received for sending US and German satellites can be used to construct toilets.
- mirchibajji 10y agoThis is a valid point, and does not deserve a down vote.
- nice2some1nice 10y agoAnd those satellites can be used to find places for the homeless in the US :)
- senthil_rajasek 10y agoyou can have a public restroom in the U.S as long as you are a male or a female and if you are not... well you are screwed.
- rzimmerman 10y agoSome more detail about the payloads: http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/06/22/pslv-c34/ http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/06/22/pslv-c34/ This launch includes 12 Earth imaging satellites from Planet (https://www.planet.com/pulse/flock-2p-launches-successfully-on-pslv/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/flock-2p-launches-successfully-...) and a second generation satellite from Google's Terra Bella.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ForFreedom 10y agoHas any country achieved this feat? [update] Has any country achieved this feat at this cost?
- witty_username 10y agoIIRC the US and Russia have launched something like 30 satellites. But, nevertheless, impressive.
- ucaetano 10y agoFrom the article: The record for the most number of satellites launched in a single mission belongs to Russia, which sent up 37 satellites in 2014.
- pilsetnieks 10y agoRead the article: > The record for the most number of satellites launched in a single mission belongs to Russia, which sent up 37 satellites in 2014. Also, it's not exactly a feat. If someone really wanted, they could stuff a rocket full of nanosats but I imagine there's more risk in launching that much at once. (They could be released in sequence but still, more chances for something to go wrong.)
- sidcool 10y agoYep, it's that easy.
- pilsetnieks 10y agoIt's not what I said. I meant that there probably are reasons apart from difficulty that people don't launch so many satellites at once.
- ucaetano 10y agoYou mean cost/kg to LEO? My short search showed costs far higher than SpaceX.
- ucaetano 10y agoAnyone has cost/kg to LEO for this launch system?
- kirrent 10y agothe PSLV's payload to LEO is 3.25 tons. Wikipedia gives the cost of a launch at 15 million USD so that gives about $4600/kg to LEO. For context, that's nearly twice as expensive per kg as a Falcon 9 launch but they're difficult to compare because they serve different launch markets.
- sidcool 10y agoThere will be naysayers when a second or third world country achieves a milestone. Inspite of similar feats done before by developed nations, this is huge for developing economies. Similar thing happened when the earlier Prime Minister of India announced that India will launch a Mars mission within a year at a fraction of cost at what NASA or ESA would do it. Most people laughed at it, and said it's impossible and what not. But guess what, India did send a successful Mars mission that's orbiting the red planet right now. Since then I take 'Expert' HN comments with a pinch of salt. Sometimes HN acknowledges a feat only when done by Elon Musk, NASA or ESA.
- x5n1 10y agoWell when your top engineers get paid 25k sure you can do it for a fraction of the cost. Why couldn't you. Indian military already has tons of tech that if they bring to the civil sector they could use to compete with whatever. The problem is usually corruption and funding. The intelligence is there, in a billion people there are a few million outliers. Heck most of American Fortune 500's are leveraging Indian brains to increase profits. Google is run by an Indian and so is Microsoft. There are Vikram Musks that are already captains of industry in America. Born and raised in India. India is a country of disparity. Both intellectual and economic. That problem is not going to be solved any time soon. But if Indians want to create companies to compete on the global stage there is not much stopping them other than their own government and financial systems.
- eklavya 10y agoTop engineers don't get paid this low but I get your point. Do you have any evidence to support that the major cost component for space missions is the salaries being paid?
- simonh 10y agoApart from land rights, all the costs of everything are salaries being paid. I'm not be facetious. It's salaries all the way down until you hit land rights.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sundarurfriend 10y ago> The chairman of the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), Kiran Kumar, told the NDTV news channel that launching 20 satellites in a single mission was like "allowing birds to fly in space". 'What, what does that mean?' > "Each of these small objects that you are putting into space will carry out their own activity, which is independent of the other, and each of them will live a wonderful life for the finite period for which they have been designed," he said, ahead of the launch. 'Oh! That was... surprisingly poetic.'
- Zelmor 10y agoThat is an aged political view of the world. Nowadays, a third world country is where you can die of disease, infection, etc. by drinking water due to lack of sanitation. Where infrastructure is missing almost completely, and where the majority of people live below international poverty lines (no, US families with 3 bedroom houses and loans to pay are not below the international poverty line. People sleeping in their newpaper-stand that they also work from are below such line.) Clean and safe menstrual pads, clean water, infrastructure, education, controlled agriculture. These are pillars of progress. Space programs are impressive, but are of very little consequence when half the population is so poor, they crap on the streets in plain sight at daylight. Meanwhile women are ashamed to hang their sanitary pads in the sun to properly disinfect them due to 3rd world superstitions about cleanness and evil spirits. There are grown men in India who don't even know that women have periods. Others bury their dead in the Ganges while downstream the same water is used for cooking and drinking. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/30/idia-sanitary-pad-revolution-menstrual-man-periods-waste-problem https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/30/idia-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachalam_Muruganantham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachalam_Muruganantham http://hazlitt.net/blog/india-has-toilet-problem-not-poop-problem http://hazlitt.net/blog/india-has-toilet-problem-not-poop-pr...
- whack 10y agoEven ignoring all the factually false statements, that was an unnecessarily condescending rant.
- themartorana 10y agoHere we go again. The statements are not false, burying your head in the sand is not going to make uncomfortable things untrue. Minus the menstrual-pad thing, I've seen the rest with my own eyes in India.
- whack 10y ago"the majority of people live below international poverty lines" The international poverty line is ~$700/year. India's average income, adjusted for purchasing parity, is $6100/year. If you're going to make inflammatory, derogatory statements, at least get your facts right.
- zump 10y agoHow can I get a job at ISRO.
- DroidX86 10y agoApply at the ISRO website.[0] They have vacancies for all kinds of positions. [0] http://www.isro.gov.in/careers http://www.isro.gov.in/careers
- zump 10y agoDo you have to be born in India?
- rck404 10y agoYes unless you can provide something Indian citizens cannot provide like expertise in some of the systems ISRO doesn't have proficiency in. I don't say these in demeaning way. India is a 1.26 billion people country and pays less when you compare to salaries of NASA in USD. There's also the aspect of ISRO also being important research organization for defence. It's more like US DRDO and NASA both in a single entity. As a national security risk it's mostly Indian citizens with SMEs on contractual basis
- pravula 10y agoNot true. ISRO is not NASA and "US DRDO" (this should be a clue. DRDO is separate) rolled into one. ISRO has been a civilian program to avoid MTCR issues (although it did not help with GSLV) with DRDO running IGMDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Guided_Missile_Development_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Guided_Missile_Deve...)
- zump 10y agoFAIL! As an Overseas Citizen of India, this is extremely disappointing!
- moyok 10y agoCould be worth noting that the pay of an entry level scientist or engineer is less than 1,000$ a month, probably making less sense to someone from outside India. It's because of a low cost of living in India.
- rrrazdan 10y agoAs an Indian and personal supporter of the Indian space program, I don't see this as a feat in the international sense. What was the technological leap? ISRO could have done this few years back as well. Its just that the payload combination clicked this time. By bragging about things like these we merely betray our jingoism. And what's more when a real technological feat happens it would be drowned out because we gloated over things like this. Also I hope many of the posters here are seriously thinking about giving to ISRO or working for them. ISRO could seriously use more tech talent.
- meanduck 10y ago> By bragging about things like these we merely betray our jingoism. And what's more when a real technological feat happens it would be drowned out because we gloated over things like this. Yes exactly. So much gloating for so many things. Only if it were media, but our prime minister tweeting so much about this one event, its not proper. At least @isro has not joined this circlejerk. Anyway its better to ignore these press-releases and focus on the people who does the real work. So does ISRO have tech blog or something where they go in detail ?
- kylehotchkiss 10y agoPublicity could lead to satellite-based companies considering Indian launches as an option over (more) expensive US/Russian/ESA led ones.
- vthallam 10y ago> As an Indian and personal supporter of the Indian space program, I don't see this as a feat in the international sense. It makes sense since the only other two agencies which were able to send many satellites were NASA and the Russian space agency. So this news shows ISRO is also a serious contender. >By bragging about things like these we merely betray our jingoism. Posting a BBC article here is not bragging. Though i wouldn't suggest people to go out and say we are the best, since we aren't, I don't see any harm in posting this kind of news on HN. You seem to think things should be ground breaking to be appreciated, it need not be to appreciate the efforts of the scientists.
- satyajeet23 10y agoOut of 20, only 2 are Indian, 13 satellites are from US and others, including one made by a Google-owned company.
- praneshp 10y agoThe satellites themselves aren't that interesting; the cool part is supposed to be 20 at a time
- zellyn 10y agoOut of curiosity: how do you launch 20 satellites like this without danger of collisions? I guess you accelerate between deploying each satellite to slightly change the orbit?
- beachstartup 10y agoperhaps like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/4omesk/precision_bun_sorting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/4omesk/pre...
- Johnie 10y agoPeople playing Kerbal Space Program [1] have been doing multiple satellite launches for a while. But the more serious point is that we now have an entire generation of kids growing up learning about rocket science. It's exciting to see what they will do with this knowledge when they grow up. See: * https://youtu.be/4WP4yICiZno https://youtu.be/4WP4yICiZno * https://youtu.be/fEtgo4M7Z8g https://youtu.be/fEtgo4M7Z8g * http://imgur.com/a/WjGNH http://imgur.com/a/WjGNH [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/
- walrus01 10y agoI wouldn't say that India is a "major player" in the satellite launch market yet, considering the reliability record of its rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle#Launch_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launc... They're uninsurable for commercial telecom satellite launches. The PSLV is slightly better but also has a much smaller market.