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by overfeed 19 days ago
India was the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt. ISRO is a highly capable org, and cost effective. India also was #4 to land on the moon after the USSR, USA and China - beating Japan to the punch. SpaceX is yet to deliver a payload to the moon or Mars - orbit or lander.
1 comments
wqaatwt 19 days ago
> the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt

Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.

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overfeed 19 days ago
How many[1] others? Not many countries can claim that achievement, industrialized or not, which is telling.

1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency

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wqaatwt 19 days ago
How many countries can claim the achievement of developing nuclear weapons? Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?

Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)

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triceratops 19 days ago
> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene

Why? According to Wikipedia they spend like $1.4b annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO That's like an extra $10 for each of these citizens living in "extreme poverty".

And what's the cutoff? Like 10% of the US population is under the poverty line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States. Is NASA "obscene" too? Granted that's not the same as "extreme poverty" but it's still a bad look in the richest country in the world, right?

> unless it provides significant economic value

Investments in science and technology generally do. Rich countries are advanced in science and technology.

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overfeed 19 days ago
> Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?

Your argument is all over the place. This thread is about if India could tackle LEO comsats, but perhaps you're seeing it through a lens of prestige/success.

> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene

You'll love Gil Scott-Heron's classic that wrestled the same ideas in the 1960s USA, titled Whitey on the Moon

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triceratops 19 days ago
How did that help them?

And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?

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