On the day of the launch, news agency Reuters said in a report that Chandrayaan-3 has been built on a budget of just under $75 million (around ₹ 615 crore).
It seems like there's a lot of renewed activity of various nations trying to land on the moon recently. Is this just a rite of passage for a space program? Or is there some other reason? I have to imagine that if there was actually some real benefit then USA would still be sending landers all the time. Curious what the interest is.
Back in 2017 ISRO had a record setting 104 satellites deployed on a single launch. Everyone said India would become the goto destination for cheap launches. Since then tens of thousands of satellites have been launched but very few via ISRO. So for whatever reason they totally missed that boat, and maybe their moon/sun/human space flight stuff is some kind of pivot.
The counter-conspiracy is that flat earthism is larger than it actually is. It's basically a meme about making fun of them, when I reckon in reality there's not a lot of them; I would bet there's a percentage of flat earthers well below the lizardman constant of 4%.
So in effect, the Flat Earth theory is popular purely because of people making fun of it. There are no more flat earthers than people who hear voices or that believe they are actually reincarnated Jesus.
I used to work with an engineer that assured me he had looked into flat earth theory and it was "legit". This same person told me he could re-write Terraform in a day, so my view of him was skewed.
However, I was genuinely surprised to find a real flat-earther in a technical role.
I kind of like flat earth because it uses all the bad argument techniques that people I can't criticize on HN without getting downvotes use. Thus, it provides a good example cases for most common bad arguments used in online debates, especially science related debates.
Somebody should put together a dictionary of informal fallacies with examples from the flat earth movement because it is not politically incorrect to criticize them while it is to criticize other movements that are more popular that regularly employ these fallacies.
One more thing: speaking of people believing they're Christ, a random guy in China in the 1850s started to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and started the biggest civil war in world history.
That’s what I thought about QAnon too. Turns out, there’s a boatload of morons out there. I have extended relatives that were QAnon fools, and are now flat earther fools.
There may be a sub-group that just wants to be open-minded. I'm 100% a science guy, but I refuse to put the probability of flat earth at 0%. Maybe 0.00000000000000001%, but not 0. :-)
Doesn’t help that the video they’re all cheering over is a computer rending (presumably being pieced together from real time telemetry data being received). Gives the layperson the idea that the whole thing is being faked.
The crash of Luna 25 disheartens me as an engineer, representing a substantial loss of effort and work. However, I'm pleased with Chandrayaan-3's success.
Britain is set to boost aid to India by 70 per cent, it has emerged, just days after the country launched a rocket into space.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which distributes aid, sent India £33.4 million in aid cash in 2022/23.
But the FCDO’s annual report, published this week, reveals that the total is set to rise to £57 million in 2024/25.
This will be topped up by an as-yet-unknown amount from the business department, which usually gives more than £10 million.
Having a space program isn't incompatible with needing aid. You can definitely make arguments about where money is being invested, of course. But you can also make arguments that Britain probably owes India a lot more than the current aid levels, so I think there's some real nuance here that probably isn't captured by HN comments.
The amount is really measly (a couple of million GBP per year). I came across this calculation that ISRO earned something like 330M GBP over the past 9 years from it's 3rd party satellite launches.
This is a question we Indians have been asking too. We also don't see the need for this in the first place.
