NREGA (Solving indian poverty) budget: Rs. 4, 000 Billion

ISRO budget : Rs. 56 Billion (0.3% of Indian Budget)

Indian Budget: Rs. 17, 000 Billion

India has lot of other problems to solve. Yes. But this news is about Indian science, and let's keep it so. Let's not take away from the scientists who are delivering good value on budget. There are platforms to vent your opinions, but this one is not the one.

If it was not for ISRO who launched INSAT 3D, cyclone phailin would have had a devastating effect. How will this help India? Indian science is progressing. Indian scientists are taking ambitious missions. It will help propel more people into these fields. Technologies do not exist in vacuum and have derivative uses.

As others have pointed out, these are not pre-requisites for a space program. And given that the $100M expenditure (Flipkart raised $160M in funding from the same country a few days back), there is no chance that it is diverting precious resources from the rest of India.

Which brings me to the latter part of your comment - that ISRO does not know how to "compete" with private space startups.

Tell me, why did you suddenly impose the private-profit constraint on India's sovereign space program? Sure ISRO derives some revenue from its commercial launch program, but that is not its primary purpose.

Investments into a country's space program (or any other strategic initiative for that matter) can rarely ever be recouped via "profits". Are NASA engineers working round the clock to compete with Space-X? Is the primary goal of the Chinese space program's to garner the largest commercial launch market share?

All of this does not mean ISRO is above criticism, nor its Mars program. For instance, why the hurry to make this happen in 2013? Why go alone instead of allying with friendly countries? Why not wait for the larger GSLV rocket to place this into orbit instead of the smaller PSLV? Why such opaque decision making around its objectives?

The latter part of this Science article covers some of these points: http://news.sciencemag.org/asia/2012/08/qualms-about-indias-...

I do not think GSLV is ready, and won't be ready any time sooner although they are testing it in December. Also, I think GSLV should achieve workhorse capability like PSLV before it can be tasked with major workloads. I think NASA is helping with the payloads on MOM. I would be curious to know which ones are contributions by NASA though [1]. Also, the landing gear is designed with the help of ROSCOSMOS [2]. Some more detailed information in these links [3, 4, 5].

[1] - http://www.isro.org/pslv-c25/pdf/mom-payloads.pdf

[2] - http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2013/pdf/2760.pdf

[3] - http://isp.justthe80.com/planetary-exploration/mars-obiter

[4] - http://antariksh-space.blogspot.ca/2013/01/isro-mars-mission...

[5] - http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3zXg2UZ2J7w/UOej3qTPVvI/AAAAAAAAAO...

[6] - http://www.iafastro.net/iac/archive/browse/IAC-12/A3/3A/1469...

[7] - http://www.ias.ac.in/jess/aug2009/d8je-91.pdf

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

Also do you even read before calling names? You're the only one who took the discussion away from the topic placed in here. Please note that groupthink of seven people who agreed with you doesn't make opinion of others (who disagree with you) any less relevant.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have replied very aptly to the points that are being raised in posts. I am not deviating in any sense at all, instead you took science away from this topic. Well then your opinion is one that gets raised thousand times, and it is under my purview to give a strong reply once.

EDIT: Reply to comment below.

"> This is civil + I would have called you out in face to face discourse too.

Notice the contradiction? You should calm down, I think."

Honestly, I am lost on the point you are trying to prove here with your comment. I am saying, I would have said those words to you face to face too.

Anyways, thank you for contributing a whole lot of this topic.

When you rely on suppliers too much, then you keep buying and selling to Arab traders, and don't develop naval capabilities. Again a tiny country from other side of the world will send a force on your shores and you will be screwed for 100s of years.

When do you intend to learn a lesson?

You may be living in the la-la land where relying on US infrastructure for a small fee looks like a great idea, but you would do well to consider what if Obama decides he doesn't like Indian anymore. Americans sent a warship in Bay of Bengal in 1971 in support of Pakistan. If you leech onto their GPS then it is not hard to imagine that you will have to seek their permission before tackling any troublemaker in the region. You may not have a problem with this setup, but many others do.

Now to see what happens to the countries that don't go beyond their coasts, look at the allocations of arctic or antarctic regions. Do you want the smallest share of the pie when moon is being mined?

And then there is China. Have you spoken to someone who can recollect what fear people lived in 1960s. In my opinion both space and nuclear program of India are not a luxury, they are necessary tools to tackle existential threats. And both of these programs have run very cost effectively with good results.

However, if you feel particularly philanthropic, then nobody stops you from being the messiah. Mother Teresa didn't come on HN to change the world. Go do what you pretend to believe in..

I am not even going into numerous benefits from ISRO, something demonstrated just a couple of days back with Phalin cyclone.

[1] - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1ocz33/a_pleasant...

The budget is shoe string, so small that its almost a rounding error in India's budget. I am not sure what you would accomplish cutting that and investing in yet another give-away-things-for-free schemes.

>>By the time ISRO of India matures up, rocketry elsewhere will move away from public institutions to the more competitive and cut-throat marketplace of private players.

Well this is as mature as it gets. A agency that has sent one probe to moon, another one in progress and is sending one to mars at a shoe string budget compared any other nation is by no means a 'immature' agency.

>>So I just don't see the point, enlighten me if there is one.

There is no point in anything. Anything for that matter, why climb the Mount Everest? Why invent the Internet, or go to the moon, or anything that will ever exist on earth. Earth is just a small rock going around an average star in some corner of a galaxy. Humanity is too small and feeble to have any impact on anything in the grand scheme of things.

>>Besides Indian Government should rather (and at least) be focusing on the more serious issues drowning 'our country in our own poop' -- things like corruption, poverty, malnutrition, malaria, dengue, power outages etc. What not!

Firstly this isn't one-after-the-other, you have to do things in parallel. Secondly if we were to wait to start before everything is right, we would never start anything.

Update: May be you should reply to specific comments. Besides, I will reply any way.

>>Can someone explain how ISRO is gonna compete tomorrow, and do the same space exploration at a competitive cost, when the rest of the world would have moved to space industry being managed by private players and even start-ups?

We should debate about that then?

How many start up's do you see in space exploration currently? Spacex doesn't count as a start up as they started with a pretty big investment.

Space exploration is expensive and requires funding across years to see any sign of success, in short you can't start a space exploration firm in your garage. This why ideally governments are better placed to chase such large decade spanning projects.

>>Someone indicated below that ISRO operates on a shoe-string budget. Can we fix that at least?

What do you want to fix? Can you point out what is broken first?

Only thing that needs to be fixed is that we need to aim higher, and provide them with better funds to get there.

Agreed, but at this point welfare, direction, basic education, tactical advantage, military advantage, logical thinking, karma and pretty much everything else is _exclusively_ ignored. Even in 'mericah it is now the private players doing the rocket rounds. Kind of like NASA, the big daddy, making way for the young and restless to come in and take over. Where would the strategy of having 'exclusive ISRO' stand in the near term?

Either you are saying: 1. India, for example, is _exclusively_ (i.e. completely) ignoring welfare - something that is clearly wrong as the country spends a lot on subsidizing food and basic amenities - you can argue the specifics of the program but can't say that the program is absent.

or you are saying 2. India is _exclusively_ focusing on ISRO, also something wrong - ISRO is a minute fraction of the budget

Why do you think that India should launch rockets only after all its socio-economic problems are fixed? There's no need to serialize them; they can all go hand in hand. Investing money in classical engineering and science might in fact help in alleviating said problems.

I, for one, don't mind government pouring money into ISRO. I am eagerly looking forward to Mars Orbiter in October, GSLV in December, SRE-2 and IRNS launches next year :)

It should be expanded, because many basic (as in, not first-order profit driven) science exploration fields will never get attention from industrial interests. These are advanced by government and academic actors.

A more robust ISRO also jump-starts opening India as a consumer of incredibly complex technology solutions. And, per the Indian imperative, these solutions may look very, very different from Amero-European parallels. It feels obvious that this then fosters new demand for STEM work and manufacturing in India.

There is no reason ISRO cannot be grown in the shape of, and compete with, private space exploration. NASA can't easily shift like that because it is so entrenched and intertwined in US legislative interests, but ISRO is an upstart still.

ISRO is already a well-known player in commercial space launches and other "space services". Check out Antrix, ISRO's commercial wing:

http://www.antrix.gov.in/

Rocketry space is under serious disruption [1], and quite rapidly at that. It has often been seen that a well-known player of today is quickly wiped out by a wave that they didn't foresee coming. India is definitely missing the up-starting entrepreneur-ism around rocketry, and that's where the strategy seems to be broken. Like it is for many other fronts, including public welfare.

[1] http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/17/1958253/china-spa...

I'm not an expert on Indian affairs, but I constantly read about how Indian bureaucracy kills initiatives by slow torture in that country, especially in government. If ISRO can figure things out on a shoestring budget, and those lean and mean operations can provide lessons to the rest of the Indian government, that alone would be an excellent reason to do this, I think. I'm not sure that operational lessons would actually be taken from ISRO and applied to other government initiatives, but if you don't have a in-your-face benchmark in the first place, how do you ever aim higher?