When things go wrong for Western companies people absolutely do blame it on cultural factors, yes. Beancounters, pressure on quarterly earnings from Wall St, to name a couple of examples. SpaceX through the sheer force of Elon's will has kept some of this at bay, but he won't be able to forever, and the cold winds are already blowing at Tesla.
Why not? A charismatic CEO can get away with a lot, in terms of investors giving them more leeway. Sometimes this is good, like Steve Jobs, sometimes it is bad, like Elizabeth Holmes.
Eventually tho' SpaceX will be as constrained by demands for quarterly earnings figures to start making bad, short-term decisions, just the same as most Western corporations.
Only if it's Musk demanding quarterly earnings figures. SpaceX is privately held, with overwhelming control by Elon himself, and much of the rest by his friends. While eventually he might be diluted out of control by (very large amounts of) additional investment, that's not going to happen any time soon, and is predicated on being significantly unprofitable for a long time.
I'm not certain technical deficiency or lack of sophistication are valid cultural factors to criticize in the case of India's space program. Having the latter implies the former aren't really issues.
Depends on how you define a "series." Atlas V has no outright failures (there were two anomalies: one placed the satellite in a different but acceptable orbit, and the second still got the satellite to the intended orbit) in 72 launches. Atlas II had no failures in 63 launches.
But that is unusual and your overall point still stands. Orbital rockets are inherently difficult and failures are to be expected.
Hacker News would do very well without uncivil handwaving generalizations like this, they spark flamewars and we learn nothing. The guidelines ask that you post civilly and substantively or not at all.
I find it unconscionable that a country with nuclear weapons and a space program still has a caste system, receives foreign aid in the 100s of millions (£) and is 93rd on the social progress index (2017). Get it together India!
Of course not, any country which is in the green on the World Happiness Report can do what they like - countries in the red however should, perhaps, look to prioritise what they spend their national resources on.
There's a common school of thought which holds that it's immoral to look to space until all problems have been solved on Earth.
I despair of reasoning with such people. With attitudes like that, we would never have left the rift valley, the trees, the ocean, or the deep-ocean thermal vents.
So, screw that. Life can both evolve and be imperfect. There's no contradiction between having our feet in the gutters and our heads in the stars: we've basically been like that for as long as we've had feet and heads. And if you're bothered by the "feet in the gutters" (as I am), it's historically and philosophically bankrupt to suggest that the way to solve the problem with the gutters is to get our heads out of the stars. That doesn't work.
I've lived in India, and having had friends in and around ISRO, have gotten into conversations with low-caste rickshaw-wallahs about the space program. They fucking LOVE it. It is a huge symbol of hope and pride for them -- a reminder that given the opportunity, they are capable of anything. (The designer of India's successful Mars mission was a Dalit).
Of course when this anti-space attitude is espoused particularly by white people with respect to brown people, it's not only philosophically bankrupt, but racist. Double plus screw that.
Replying to your bottom comment about green/red. India is a big country and is a republic. I think you are from a small country with homogenous makeup. You can't begin to comprehend India. And seeing it on a chart towards a bottom and having a nuclear + space program must baffle you
I am asked questions upfront about rape culture. Nevermind the fact that these stories being in news and media emphasis that they are not the norm.
Also, I squarely understand that poor people in western countries hate India. They take solace in knowing that some people in the world are worse off then them. Successful Chinese are labelled as syndicates. Singapore means chewing gums not allowed.
> Nevermind the fact that these stories being in news and media emphasis that they are not the norm.
I would say that India does have a rape culture, especially in North India. Except for a few small affluent areas in Delhi and Gurugram, women can't venture out safely.
North India is a big place. It's easy to lump people together. For e.g. state of Punjab, HP (Himalayas) are in North. Virtually crime free. Fairly good living standard
India has an insane population - 1.3bn - and some of the most complicated geo-politics on its doorstep. China, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
The cultural progress in India is very complex, it is nothing like the newly built USA - its histories and personal cultures are old and deeply entrenched - and it is nothing like the Europe that, in many ways, fucked it up with Empire. But we are seeing progress.
It is interesting to find that India is largely western sympathetic, and it is highly beneficial to westerners that it is. We put the geo-politics in western favour by ensuring they have nuclear weapons and advanced science programs, and we try and strengthen the nation and resolve the societal issues with aid money.
I'm not saying India doesn't have massive corruption, and I'm not saying the aid and incentives are definitely applied in the right way, but I am saying that calling out aid as incompatible with nukes and spaceflight highlights an ignorance of what goes on in India and the surrounding nations - and its impact on the west.
The US doesn't have a proper healthcare system, what's it doing with a space program? The EU has a still-simmering financial crisis; what's it doing with a space program? Japan has a looming demographic crisis, what's it doing with a space program?
I mean, you could say this about literally anywhere. No space programs allowed until everything is perfect!
41 launches with 2 failures seems pretty impressive to me. I think the current Soyuz (Soyuz-2) is at nearly 70 launches with 3 or 4 failures (some partial) and this is considered one of the most reliable systems made so far. (Obviously not making an exact comparison - PSLV can only lift around half or so as much to LEO as Soyuz).
Hopefully they will find the root cause and get it fixed before serious delays to the Indus lunar rover launch are caused.
Ariane V and current-Soyuz's predecessor would have better track records. But yeah, 2 failures in 41 launches puts it fairly high in the league tables.
Payload shroud and other separation failures are actually one of the most common failure modes in orbital launch once past the early space age. It's easy to have problems with systems that you don't or cannot test before deployment.
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?
Unless 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.
GEO 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.
This 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.
Also 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.
51 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThem damn Indians and their shoddy engineering is certainly to blame. It's just stereotyping/racism. Flagging/downvoting would be appropriate here.
Odd. When SpaceX loses a rocket, do you write that off as American technical deficiency as well?
Eventually tho' SpaceX will be as constrained by demands for quarterly earnings figures to start making bad, short-term decisions, just the same as most Western corporations.
But that is unusual and your overall point still stands. Orbital rockets are inherently difficult and failures are to be expected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Or is India somehow special?
I despair of reasoning with such people. With attitudes like that, we would never have left the rift valley, the trees, the ocean, or the deep-ocean thermal vents.
So, screw that. Life can both evolve and be imperfect. There's no contradiction between having our feet in the gutters and our heads in the stars: we've basically been like that for as long as we've had feet and heads. And if you're bothered by the "feet in the gutters" (as I am), it's historically and philosophically bankrupt to suggest that the way to solve the problem with the gutters is to get our heads out of the stars. That doesn't work.
I've lived in India, and having had friends in and around ISRO, have gotten into conversations with low-caste rickshaw-wallahs about the space program. They fucking LOVE it. It is a huge symbol of hope and pride for them -- a reminder that given the opportunity, they are capable of anything. (The designer of India's successful Mars mission was a Dalit).
Of course when this anti-space attitude is espoused particularly by white people with respect to brown people, it's not only philosophically bankrupt, but racist. Double plus screw that.
I am asked questions upfront about rape culture. Nevermind the fact that these stories being in news and media emphasis that they are not the norm.
Also, I squarely understand that poor people in western countries hate India. They take solace in knowing that some people in the world are worse off then them. Successful Chinese are labelled as syndicates. Singapore means chewing gums not allowed.
I would say that India does have a rape culture, especially in North India. Except for a few small affluent areas in Delhi and Gurugram, women can't venture out safely.
giving the money directly to the poor is like giving a starving person a fish, having a space agency is teaching your people to make tofu.
It's probably not the single most effective measure against poverty, but it doesn't seem like the worst thing to do either.
The cultural progress in India is very complex, it is nothing like the newly built USA - its histories and personal cultures are old and deeply entrenched - and it is nothing like the Europe that, in many ways, fucked it up with Empire. But we are seeing progress.
It is interesting to find that India is largely western sympathetic, and it is highly beneficial to westerners that it is. We put the geo-politics in western favour by ensuring they have nuclear weapons and advanced science programs, and we try and strengthen the nation and resolve the societal issues with aid money.
I'm not saying India doesn't have massive corruption, and I'm not saying the aid and incentives are definitely applied in the right way, but I am saying that calling out aid as incompatible with nukes and spaceflight highlights an ignorance of what goes on in India and the surrounding nations - and its impact on the west.
one could argue that the entire basis for 'european culture' is empire; for better or worse - and as a simple observation.
I mean, you could say this about literally anywhere. No space programs allowed until everything is perfect!
I could debate you on everything but I will take you up on this.
India has repeatedly requested UK not to donate any money for the last few years http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/9061844...
Most of the Western money anyway goes into "Christian Missionaries" in remote tribal areas.
India also donates more money than it receives. http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2017/mar/22/emerging-...
Posting like this will get your main account banned too, so please don't do it again.
Hopefully they will find the root cause and get it fixed before serious delays to the Indus lunar rover launch are caused.
With the headline "rocket fails" i was expecting an exploding rocket.
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?
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.
> 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