7 ms·

Nice to see this. India is poised to have a large aviation and manufacturing industry, yet all the hard-skills are in the west. (GE, P&W, Boeing, Airbus). ISRO

by screye 3y ago

Nice to see this. India is poised to have a large aviation and manufacturing industry, yet all the hard-skills are in the west. (GE, P&W, Boeing, Airbus). ISRO and Brahmos can serve as a DARPA-esque seed for upskilling highly talented aviation engineering talent. With HAL, Air India and the aviation industry going private, there might be more opportunities for prospective aerospace experts to build out their own industry after stints at ISRO/Brahmos. India produces amazing mechanical engineers. As compared to other difficult to break in industries (Chips, Hi-tech agriculture, Genomics), India is actually well situated to break into the aviation industry successfully.

whinvik 3y ago
I haven't seen any mention of HAL being privatized before.
- screye 3y ago
  Govt. is reducing its investment in HAL and HAL had an IPO in 2018. [1][2] Ofc, Indian institutions are averse to privatization. So it has been a slow process. That being said, the direction of change is towards steady privatization. [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/indian-govt-proposes-sell-up-35-stake-hal-2023-03-22/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/indian-govt-proposes-s... [2] https://theprint.in/economy/rafale-snub-no-death-knell-hals-market-cap-up-280-since-ipo-launch-is-now-biggest-defence-psu/1620546/ https://theprint.in/economy/rafale-snub-no-death-knell-hals-...
eldaisfish 3y ago
[flagged]
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Are there any sources for your claim that "India's critical space technology is not designed or developed in India" as relating to recent missions such as this one?
- blahblahblah10 3y ago
  I am not an expert on their space program or the provenance of rocketry inventions but they seem to have developed both the cryogenic engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20) and the boosters in-house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) - according to the article, the initial design was based on the Viking engine back in the 1970s but haven't they developed it more since then?!). It also seems the payloads are also built in-house. I would be very interested in more details though.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Vikas was essentially a carbon copy of the French Viking engine. The CE-20 is an upscale version of Russian tech. None of this stuff was designed in house.
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    that’s exactly my point. Those engines are incremental improvements on existing designs from the 1970s and 60s - hence why you will find this tech in western museums. There have been improvements - certainly - and the engines are now made almost entirely in India but the original point stands - the designs are not indian hence why we should temper our expectations of where Indian aerospace can go. They currently occupy the niche of cheap space launches and that is based on excellent work by ISRO and their partners.
    - blahblahblah10 3y ago
      That's a valid argument but still a bit strange. One could make the same argument about: - chip design - modern processors are not fundamentally different from 8086, which also belongs in a museum. Sure, there's much higher transistor density and advances like pipelining, branch prediction, multiple cores etc. but fundamentally it's still the same physics and design. - machine learning - aren't modern deep networks just scaled up versions (with some new architectural components although one can argue that even these were discovered in the 80s and 90s) of old ideas that still use gradient descent and backpropagation. this too sounds like incremental progress. - commercial aircraft - aren't modern planes just incremental advances of 50-year old planes (the 747 is from the 60s). sure, they are more efficient, use lighter composites etc. I guess my point is that either (a) technology as a whole has been making incremental progress when viewed from a certain lens, or (b) that while, superficially, a lot of technology still follows designs discovered decades ago, there have been substantial and deep improvements at various lower levels of the "stack". Maybe a concrete way of looking at this particular issue would be to compare metrics like efficiency of the engines (is amount of thrust * time thrust was produced for / amount of fuel used = change in momentum / amount of fuel used, a useful metric?) or just raw amount of thrust produced? Then one could argue that an engine is essentially still the same as ones from a few decades ago.
- soligern 3y ago
  They were based initially on western designs but are built domestically and I can assume improved on.
  - 1024core 3y ago
    Just like the US rockets were based on the German V2 designs. You don't see much mention of the US copying Germans whenever the US launches a rocket; and yet here we are.
    - soligern 3y ago
      It was the same with the Chinese around 20 years ago on the internet as well. A significant number of people in the west don’t want India or China to succeed. Asian countries know how to deal with this though- just don’t engage, ignore the opinions of that segment of the western population (in the case of China, literally block them out with the firewall) and keep chugging on. You silence them with results.
      - vGPU 3y ago
        Indeed. Look at how the US and the CIA sabotaged the technology transfer from Russia.
- mindaslab 3y ago
  India first wished to purchase its way to space, but due to US embargo it was forced to develop its space program in house. Thus, it's very cheap to launch Indian rockets these days due to lack of imported parts. In fact Indian rockets use computers fully made in India, and I think none of its software is taken from anywhere. There were several attempts to derail its space program like mysterious deaths of Homi Baba, Vikram Sarabhai, arrests of Nambi Narayanan and defaming Madhava Nair, but Indian space program like a tortoise has put one foot forward every time. The limiting factor for ISRO is not design and R&D, but it's the capacity of Indian industry to deliver. I think its rocket development is open source, any Indian industry can take its blueprints and volunteer to supply parts. How they [ISRO] stir up such a passion amongst their employees is a mystery.
- 1024core 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - eldaisfish 3y ago
    Instead of pointing out that many US rocket designs were German ones you launch into a personal attack. There is nothing wrong with borrowing technical work, just that rocketry is complex, needs investment and has a very long path to benefits. Shameful.
    - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
      If it is common why point that out?
    - 1024core 3y ago
      > you launch into a personal attack. Because I'm tired of seeing these bigots come crawling out of the woodwork any time India does something nice.
melling 3y ago
Within 50 years, India will pass the United States to become the second largest economy: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-second-largest-economy-by-2075-goldman-sachs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-secon...
- paxys 3y ago
  Yet will continue to be among the worst in the world in all per capita metrics. Is having a large economy really that meaningful when the benefits are enjoyed by the top 0.1% and not able to trickle down?
  - soligern 3y ago
    That’s essentially impossible. The birth rate in India is below 2 at this point so the population will drop. That combined with a larger economy means the per capita metrics will improve.
- enkid 3y ago
  Economic projections like this are notoriously bad. For example, two editions of the same text book used the exact same graph showing the Soviet Union would pass the US is about 20 years... Despite the editions being twenty years apart. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/soviet-growth-american-textbooks.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/so...
- qazpot 3y ago
  50 Years is too long a time period to make any kind of useful prediction.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  I am a believer in India but this is a ridiculous horizon. Looks like some intern at GS found out FBProphet.
- screye 3y ago
  Sometimes you're Argentina, sometimes you are Spain. [1] Same people, same starting point, different outcomes. [1] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/argentina/spain?sector=GDP+per+capita+%28Dollars%29&sc=XE34#tbl https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/argentina/spain... Have to wait and see. Only time will tell.
kylehotchkiss 3y ago
I think India will succeed in its space ambitions. I hope this one makes it! But aviation in general, not as much. China doesn’t have the ability to make engines for its own commercial airliners yet. India doesn’t have the industrial capacity to build the airliners themselves right now. HAL can build a few but India still depends on Russian jets. Air India going private isn’t a sign of success in the industry. The government ran in into the ground, it got purchased without much of that debt, and the Tatas have limits to how quickly they can remove the tenured “government job” bureaucrats from the system. The government is still doing air India major favors by heavily restricting access to Indian passengers by foreign airlines (just this year they denied emirates an upgrade from 50000/seats a week, and denied a United/emirates codeshare agreement). This ends up hurting them too since they are limited to 50000/seats a week. One place I will give Indian aviation major credit is the air traffic upgrades they’ve done over the past 20 years. They are almost as safe as American airspace with some of the busiest airports in the world. I think India has a lot of potential though, especially in medical fields, I mean 2/3 of the world already has Indian vaccines don’t they?

by screye 3y ago

whinvik 3y ago

I haven't seen any mention of HAL being privatized before.

screye 3y ago
Govt. is reducing its investment in HAL and HAL had an IPO in 2018. [1][2] Ofc, Indian institutions are averse to privatization. So it has been a slow process. That being said, the direction of change is towards steady privatization. [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/indian-govt-proposes-sell-up-35-stake-hal-2023-03-22/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/indian-govt-proposes-s... [2] https://theprint.in/economy/rafale-snub-no-death-knell-hals-market-cap-up-280-since-ipo-launch-is-now-biggest-defence-psu/1620546/ https://theprint.in/economy/rafale-snub-no-death-knell-hals-...

eldaisfish 3y ago

[flagged]

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Are there any sources for your claim that "India's critical space technology is not designed or developed in India" as relating to recent missions such as this one?
blahblahblah10 3y ago
I am not an expert on their space program or the provenance of rocketry inventions but they seem to have developed both the cryogenic engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20) and the boosters in-house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) - according to the article, the initial design was based on the Viking engine back in the 1970s but haven't they developed it more since then?!). It also seems the payloads are also built in-house. I would be very interested in more details though.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Vikas was essentially a carbon copy of the French Viking engine. The CE-20 is an upscale version of Russian tech. None of this stuff was designed in house.
- eldaisfish 3y ago
  that’s exactly my point. Those engines are incremental improvements on existing designs from the 1970s and 60s - hence why you will find this tech in western museums. There have been improvements - certainly - and the engines are now made almost entirely in India but the original point stands - the designs are not indian hence why we should temper our expectations of where Indian aerospace can go. They currently occupy the niche of cheap space launches and that is based on excellent work by ISRO and their partners.
  - blahblahblah10 3y ago
    That's a valid argument but still a bit strange. One could make the same argument about: - chip design - modern processors are not fundamentally different from 8086, which also belongs in a museum. Sure, there's much higher transistor density and advances like pipelining, branch prediction, multiple cores etc. but fundamentally it's still the same physics and design. - machine learning - aren't modern deep networks just scaled up versions (with some new architectural components although one can argue that even these were discovered in the 80s and 90s) of old ideas that still use gradient descent and backpropagation. this too sounds like incremental progress. - commercial aircraft - aren't modern planes just incremental advances of 50-year old planes (the 747 is from the 60s). sure, they are more efficient, use lighter composites etc. I guess my point is that either (a) technology as a whole has been making incremental progress when viewed from a certain lens, or (b) that while, superficially, a lot of technology still follows designs discovered decades ago, there have been substantial and deep improvements at various lower levels of the "stack". Maybe a concrete way of looking at this particular issue would be to compare metrics like efficiency of the engines (is amount of thrust * time thrust was produced for / amount of fuel used = change in momentum / amount of fuel used, a useful metric?) or just raw amount of thrust produced? Then one could argue that an engine is essentially still the same as ones from a few decades ago.
soligern 3y ago
They were based initially on western designs but are built domestically and I can assume improved on.
- 1024core 3y ago
  Just like the US rockets were based on the German V2 designs. You don't see much mention of the US copying Germans whenever the US launches a rocket; and yet here we are.
  - soligern 3y ago
    It was the same with the Chinese around 20 years ago on the internet as well. A significant number of people in the west don’t want India or China to succeed. Asian countries know how to deal with this though- just don’t engage, ignore the opinions of that segment of the western population (in the case of China, literally block them out with the firewall) and keep chugging on. You silence them with results.
    - vGPU 3y ago
      Indeed. Look at how the US and the CIA sabotaged the technology transfer from Russia.
mindaslab 3y ago
India first wished to purchase its way to space, but due to US embargo it was forced to develop its space program in house. Thus, it's very cheap to launch Indian rockets these days due to lack of imported parts. In fact Indian rockets use computers fully made in India, and I think none of its software is taken from anywhere. There were several attempts to derail its space program like mysterious deaths of Homi Baba, Vikram Sarabhai, arrests of Nambi Narayanan and defaming Madhava Nair, but Indian space program like a tortoise has put one foot forward every time. The limiting factor for ISRO is not design and R&D, but it's the capacity of Indian industry to deliver. I think its rocket development is open source, any Indian industry can take its blueprints and volunteer to supply parts. How they [ISRO] stir up such a passion amongst their employees is a mystery.
1024core 3y ago
[flagged]
- eldaisfish 3y ago
  Instead of pointing out that many US rocket designs were German ones you launch into a personal attack. There is nothing wrong with borrowing technical work, just that rocketry is complex, needs investment and has a very long path to benefits. Shameful.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    If it is common why point that out?
  - 1024core 3y ago
    > you launch into a personal attack. Because I'm tired of seeing these bigots come crawling out of the woodwork any time India does something nice.

melling 3y ago

Within 50 years, India will pass the United States to become the second largest economy: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-second-largest-economy-by-2075-goldman-sachs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/india-to-become-worlds-secon...

paxys 3y ago
Yet will continue to be among the worst in the world in all per capita metrics. Is having a large economy really that meaningful when the benefits are enjoyed by the top 0.1% and not able to trickle down?
- soligern 3y ago
  That’s essentially impossible. The birth rate in India is below 2 at this point so the population will drop. That combined with a larger economy means the per capita metrics will improve.
enkid 3y ago
Economic projections like this are notoriously bad. For example, two editions of the same text book used the exact same graph showing the Soviet Union would pass the US is about 20 years... Despite the editions being twenty years apart. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/soviet-growth-american-textbooks.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/so...
qazpot 3y ago
50 Years is too long a time period to make any kind of useful prediction.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
I am a believer in India but this is a ridiculous horizon. Looks like some intern at GS found out FBProphet.
screye 3y ago
Sometimes you're Argentina, sometimes you are Spain. [1] Same people, same starting point, different outcomes. [1] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/argentina/spain?sector=GDP+per+capita+%28Dollars%29&sc=XE34#tbl https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/argentina/spain... Have to wait and see. Only time will tell.

kylehotchkiss 3y ago

I think India will succeed in its space ambitions. I hope this one makes it! But aviation in general, not as much. China doesn’t have the ability to make engines for its own commercial airliners yet. India doesn’t have the industrial capacity to build the airliners themselves right now. HAL can build a few but India still depends on Russian jets. Air India going private isn’t a sign of success in the industry. The government ran in into the ground, it got purchased without much of that debt, and the Tatas have limits to how quickly they can remove the tenured “government job” bureaucrats from the system. The government is still doing air India major favors by heavily restricting access to Indian passengers by foreign airlines (just this year they denied emirates an upgrade from 50000/seats a week, and denied a United/emirates codeshare agreement). This ends up hurting them too since they are limited to 50000/seats a week. One place I will give Indian aviation major credit is the air traffic upgrades they’ve done over the past 20 years. They are almost as safe as American airspace with some of the busiest airports in the world. I think India has a lot of potential though, especially in medical fields, I mean 2/3 of the world already has Indian vaccines don’t they?