As The Economist wrote when China launched its first manned space mission a few years back: “Congratulations! So no more aid then?”
From the Times of India:
The spacecraft, lodged at `Checkout 2′ room at the centre is all decked up with golden multilayer insulated foils covering a major part of its body with the highly sophisticated components sitting snugly inside.
The spacecraft [will carry] a Terrain Mapping Stereo Camera which could capture images having five m spatial resolutions ([the] size of the smallest object that can be seen) and [a] 20 km swath (width of the picture). This will help in [the] topographic mapping of moon.
Now I’m not generally one to pooh-pooh space exploration or any exploration. But the cost of the Chandrayaan-1 mission, set to launch on Oct. 19, is estimated at roughly 4 billion rupees, or $91 million. The next phase, Chandrayaan-2, is expected to cost another $97 million. This is pretty cheap as far as space programs go (NASA’s Endeavour shuttle cost $1.7 billion just to build, and launches typically run another $450 million), but with a poorly paid, increasingly educated workforce, a dollar goes a long way in India, and this is a huge sum of money here.
Because space programs are so outrageously expensive, they’ve generally been the domain of wealthy countries where things like contaminated drinking water, epidemic disease and rural education are no longer widespread problems. So how can India’s government justify spending $180 million on lunar rovers when 1 in 13 Indian children never see their 5th birthday, and the average Indian man can only expect to live until his 62nd — right around the time most Canadians begin their 20 years of retirement?
At the risk of getting long-winded here, 60 per cent of the world’s leprosy sufferers live in India, one in ten Indians has chronic kidney disease, and “tuberculosis is the largest single cause of adult illness and death from a communicable disease in India,” according to the World Bank. Not to mention anthrax, cholera, typhus, hepatitis A and B, malaria, the plague, leptospirosis and other waterborne diseases, japanese encephalitis, typhoid fever, dengue fever, elephantiasis, leishmaniasis, polio, rabies and an HIV/AIDS infection rate four and a half times higher than that of the U.K.
And while we’re on the subject of spending priorities, my two minutes of Googling weren’t enough to find the cost of India’s nuclear weapons development program, but the bill for Pakistan’s was apparently somewhere in the area of $10 billion to $15 billion, and the Indian numbers are probably similar. In southeast Asia, $15 billion is a heck of a lot of cash, and a ridiculous number of rupees — 687,377,022,240 of them, to be precise. I can understand an emerging superpower’s desire to build its profile and make a splash on the world stage. But in a country where a 1.5L bottle of clean drinking water costs 12 rupees, and where a big meal at tourist prices might set you back 60, it’s hard to justify spending such vast sums on moon-crawling robots and rocket-propelled death.
Image via NASA’s Starchild project.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Asher Vijay // Sep 20, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Yes.
2 Jocelyne // Sep 21, 2008 at 4:45 pm
So how can India’s government justify spending $180 million on lunar rover?
I really would like to read an answer to this question. I dont understand.
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