India has endorsed an ambitious US$2.5 billion plan to launch its first astronauts into orbit by 2015, a move seen as an attempt to catch up with China in an emerging Asian space race.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) proposes to put two people into space, 274km above the Earth, for seven days — a plan endorsed by the country’s top economic policymaking body, the Planning Commission.
“ISRO has done an expert job and it needs to be supported,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the commission.
The Human Space Flight project will have two phases: an unmanned flight launched in 2013 or 2014 and a manned mission the following year.
The Indian Cabinet still has to approve the plan, but a spokesman for ISRO said the support of the commission was a “major step forward.”
If the country succeeded, it would become only the fourth — after the US, Russia and China — to send a man into space.
There is little doubt about India’s sense of purpose. Earlier this month, ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair unveiled blueprints at an international aeronautical show in Bangalore for the three-tonne space capsule, which would have room for a three-person crew.
India is also setting up a training center for astronauts in the south — and demonstrated it could launch and recover a space capsule that splashed down in the Bay of Bengal in January 2007.
The new mission will not be entirely homegrown. Moscow will help to build the astronaut capsule and select and train the astronauts. An Indian astronaut will also get a “trial run” abroad a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2013. The astronaut will be the second Indian in space after Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a joint space program between India and Russia in 1984.
Gopal Raj, author of Reach for the Stars, a book about the country’s rocket program, said: “This smacks of ISRO looking to keep up with China. It’s becoming a national prestige issue. I am not sure what you get from astronauts in space. Even the Europeans, who are much richer, have not got manned space flight programs.”
However, ISRO says such talk underestimates India’s final goals.
“We are not doing this because of China [which launched astronauts into space in 2003]. We want to get beyond the moon, which we see as just an intermediate base in the future. For this, you need humans; robots will not be enough,” the organization said.
Others have warned that ISRO’s budget is expanding at a time when the country faces both an economic slowdown and widespread poverty. An estimated 40 percent of the world’s severely malnourished children live in India, and more than 800 million people live on US$0.50 a day in the country.
“India has major issues regarding education, health [and] rural sanitization, and these struggle to get funds,” the columnist Praful Bidwai said. “Yet here we are, funding a giant national ego trip when people do not have latrines. It’s monstrous ... If the aim is to promote science, why not invest in climate change technologies?”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing