5 ms·

They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in

by mrkgnao 10y ago

They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]). The reason I'm not very gung-ho right now is because there is, just maybe, a future in which ISRO isn't just "one of the space agencies that have made it into orbit", but as important to the future of space as NASA was a decade or two earlier, and getting there involves not just doing good work, but being ambitious at the scale of SpaceX and such. ISRO is being funded well right now, but if they can't "make it" in the next decade, with NASA in a slightly precarious position and private companies with no history of going into space doing all manner of remarkable things, they are going to miss this shot, and that can be dangerous in a political climate where the "can such a poor country really afford to go into space" types might drown out more reasonable people and shutter things for good. I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers. Good promotional material attracts talent: I seem to remember someone from SpaceX saying "our webcasts are actually recruitment propaganda", and, well, they work! Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi? [0]: Around 1.5 tons, and, no, I'm not discounting the challenges of actually releasing that many microsatellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSLV-C28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSLV-C28

sandGorgon 10y ago
> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]). Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbiter-mission-stem-lifest/1/885386.html http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi... they are all "management looking". You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia. We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.
- kamaal 10y ago
  >>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it. Oh yes we are. But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack. Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder. The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India. I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services. Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more). Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it. [0]: /s
kamaal 10y ago
>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space" Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones. This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy. This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run. >>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers. ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards. Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't. Eg: They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?" From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap. >>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi? Why not? Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
- grkvlt 10y ago
  No, the problem isn't the language it's the name - they should name it the "Splendid Interplanetary Explorer" in Hindi, or something.
- RugnirViking 10y ago
  I believe they mean call it a more inspiring name - something like america's 'curiosity' or 'voyager'
monster_group 10y ago
For some reason you seem to be ashamed of your own culture. What's wrong in calling the Mars mission by its Hindi/Sanskrit name? Do China, Japan and Russia not use names from their languages for their missions? And what's wrong with old people appearing in the webcasts. They are the people behind the mission. They know the most and can inspire the best. NASA always puts their scientists (which are mostly old) in their webcasts. Do you recommend NASA do the same to attract youngsters?
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  See my replies downthread. It's not Hindi that I dislike, it's the choice of the name. I'm definitely on board about Hindi being a good idea for Indian spacecraft. Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.

by mrkgnao 10y ago

sandGorgon 10y ago

> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]). Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbiter-mission-stem-lifest/1/885386.html http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi... they are all "management looking". You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia. We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

kamaal 10y ago
>>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it. Oh yes we are. But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack. Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder. The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India. I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services. Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.
mrkgnao 10y ago
You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more). Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it. [0]: /s

kamaal 10y ago

>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space" Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones. This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy. This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run. >>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers. ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards. Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't. Eg: They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?" From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap. >>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi? Why not? Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?

grkvlt 10y ago
No, the problem isn't the language it's the name - they should name it the "Splendid Interplanetary Explorer" in Hindi, or something.
RugnirViking 10y ago
I believe they mean call it a more inspiring name - something like america's 'curiosity' or 'voyager'

monster_group 10y ago

For some reason you seem to be ashamed of your own culture. What's wrong in calling the Mars mission by its Hindi/Sanskrit name? Do China, Japan and Russia not use names from their languages for their missions? And what's wrong with old people appearing in the webcasts. They are the people behind the mission. They know the most and can inspire the best. NASA always puts their scientists (which are mostly old) in their webcasts. Do you recommend NASA do the same to attract youngsters?

mrkgnao 10y ago
See my replies downthread. It's not Hindi that I dislike, it's the choice of the name. I'm definitely on board about Hindi being a good idea for Indian spacecraft. Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.