India's moon mission - Chandrayaan-I

Woo Hoo !! This is my first entry on this blog !!


India launched their first unmanned space craft (Chandrayaan-I) to moon on 22 Oct 2008. It's an historic feat for them. But there are lot of critics who oppose this project. Critics in India argue that the money that was spent on this mission, $80 million, could well be spent on other projects to eradicate poverty. I'm not going to argue over that. That's a different discussion in itself.


This morning, my colleagues in the US were criticizing about this mission. I'm going to talk about them. They were saying that "India is a country where cows and stray dogs roam around the streets. Monkeys snatch food from humans. Communal clashes are part of their life. It's a big joke that they are launching a space craft to moon. What are they going to achieve by doing this?"

I wanted to say "Dude, there could be so many reasons that India might be doing this. There is no clear cut map of moon available now; there is a theory that Helium-3 is avaialble in abundance there - if so, is it possible to make use of it for the human race in earth, etc. This is not a project that the whole world mourns about; this is something even NASA wants to do - in fact, they have sent 2 of their own payloads along with India's 5 payloads and European Unions 3 payloads. Also, when US entered the space race 50 years ago, the main purpose was to beat Russia. I'm sure there were lot of problems back then which they could have solved instead entering space race. Moreoever, this is not a space race." Well, I didn't say this on his face.

But, just because someone is poor, we cannot deny his dreams or his ambitions. Who knows one day India might be a super power just like US !!