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There are a couple of dead comments that, essentially, made the same argument that I've heard here in Scotland when there was talk of a Space Port being set up:
by phaemon 9y ago
There are a couple of dead comments that, essentially, made the same argument that I've heard here in Scotland when there was talk of a Space Port being set up: why are you wasting money on this when there are problems with poverty etc right here at home.
The response to those arguments, at least here, is simple enough. There are currently about 7000 jobs in the Scottish space industry and in the last two years Glasgow has built more satellites than any other city in Europe. Yet, we have to go to another country to get these satellites launched!
And I suppose the choice of phrase, "space industry", is what makes the difference. It can seem reasonable to say, "this country shouldn't have a space program" but it sounds far less defensible to argue, "this country shouldn't have a space industry".
And so with India. This particular launch was for the Indian government, but the article mentions the previous record-breaking launch of 104 satellites at once. Of those, 88 were for a company called Planet, "a US private imaging company". And the others were commercial launches for various other countries.
Since the space industry is rapidly growing with huge commercial potential, it seems ludicrous to argue that you shouldn't be developing it. It would be like someone 20 years ago arguing that you shouldn't be developing Internet connections when you had poverty issues to deal with. How exactly will avoiding hi-tech industry help that in any way?
- rtx 9y agoWe also got ICBMS out of the program so its a win-win.
- andars 9y agoMore like we got a space program from ICBMs.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoUnless you're launching into high-inclination orbits you really don't want to be launching out of Scotland. Anything going to GEO (quite a large percentage of commercial satellites) needs to be launched from near the equator.
- mikeash 9y agoGEO launches are more efficient when launched from near the equator, but it's far from "needs." The Russians launch into GEO from Baikonur, for example, which requires at least a 51.6 degree inclination. The latitude of a Scottish spaceport would be a bit higher, but not enormously so. For a less extreme example, there are lots of launches into GEO from Kennedy Space Center, which is at a latitude of 28.5 degrees. The same rocket will be able to put more payload into GEO if launched from a lower latitude, but that doesn't make high latitudes impractical.
- raamdev 9y agoThis reminds me of a letter that was written by a NASA engineer in the 1970s in response to a nun in Africa who was questioning the value of spending billions on space exploration. > In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. The letter is well worth the read: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
- snrplfth 9y agoAlso the space industry has real utility for poor Indians. Weather forecasting and crop monitoring are really important for farmers in India, and have gotten a lot better since India's been able to put up a constellation of dedicated satellites for this task.