>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space"
Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.
This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.
>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.
Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.
Eg:
They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"
Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
Why not?
Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.
> Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
Exactly my point. There was a ton of nonsense around the time of Chandrayaan about whether or not it was right to spend money on such things "when people were starving": in case it wasn't clear, I think that's bullshit. And I'm worried about it coming back, and actually doing some serious damage this time.
> Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
As some of the other replies to your comment also point out: my problem is not the Hindi. If we launched a space telescope, I fear it'd end up named "Mahakashdoorbeen" or something. Why not something less boring than "Mars Vehicle" (which is what Mangalyaan translates to)? Remember, a 19- or 20-year-old is still young enough to be attracted to shiny things, so moralizing about how this is "useless nonconstructive criticism" doesn't help. The name doesn't increase the maximum pressure the rocket can survive, but it gets you people who can.
> Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
That's very interesting: it's reminiscent of Erlang, in a way. Launch a ton of cheap missions, expect some to fail, work on reducing the failure rate while not crying because a couple went up in smoke. I could see this turning into something big if they took it farther in public.
> ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere.
Why does it need to stay that way? It seems you know more than me about how ISRO works, so this just makes me sadder.
--
It seems from the downvotes that people think I'm one of the rabid "India is a toilet" types that surface on /r/worldnews whenever there's some good news about India. I'm not: it's just I think that more Indian leadership (for lack of a better word, again) in space (and STEM more generally) is something to legitimately care and feel proud about.
>>Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.
Wanting the end without any focus on means will take us no where.
Like I said in another comment. Focus on development of human resources. Good quality and uniform standard of education for everyone without discrimination. Building high quality higher institutions of the standard of Harvard's, MIT's and Stanford's is what will prepare your next generation of citizens who will build the next space stations and space telescopes.
In short solve social and political problems first. Western perspective on India is right though. You can't have starving people, who don't have access or means to basic hygiene or sanitation, coupled with society deeply in social problems won't take you too far.
What you have at ISRO is despite these problems and initial inertial of the initiatives created by a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately off late the country's politics hasn't much talent to offer to the challenges and needs of our times.
I would like to tangentially note that NASA couldn't have done what it has done without the post-WWII Operation Paperclip, in which the USA literally stole Germany's rocket scientists.
Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.
This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.
>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.
Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.
Eg:
They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"
From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms
Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
Why not?
Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?