Chandrayaan I : Post Launch

The launch of India’s first mission to moon went off pretty smoothly but even though it was a proud moment, one just doesn’t get the feel of a manned mission. During the launch, I was like if this thing fails it would be a a major setback but one can always rebuild all the probes and the instruments and so the tension just was not there. But show me a video of a manned mission, and I get all twitchy and nervous hoping that the people aboard don’t get screwed. Robots don’t hold the same amount of respect and awe associated with them as a human being and I guess it will remain so until we learn to build humans from scratch so death would not mean you lose someone because you can recreate the very same human being. (Someday it will happen, Someday. Because we are just machines ourselves and  Awesome ones at that.)

Man Vs Machine. A manned mission takes up so much more resources and money while returning lesser amount of data but I guess the ultimate aim of space exploration is to colonise our galaxy and beyond. But must manned missions be the ultimate goal of our nation? At least for the time being we have so many other problems and maybe we should stick to solving those first while spending moderate amounts of money over robotic space exploration and leave manned missions to richer nations . Or maybe we find a way to tap all the He 3 on the moon and transport the resource and find a way to produce energy and get rich and have the best Space Program in the world :D.

I think we should start a different kind of a space race, a sport of some kind, something like Formula 1 but Space Racing because sport can bring in a lot of money and also capture the imagination of people all over the world and also it would result in the teams pushing the limits with every race leading to new technologies and engineering concepts and overall faster development in breaking the Final Frontier.

Finally see this video of Chandrayaan I launch captured by some guys and it is a better video than the one broadcast on TV ( which showed the launched spacecraft flying for exactly 3 secs before it went into the clouds never to be seen again ). So enjoy the video and the guys are Tamil and so it is awesomer. I wish I had gone there to see the launch, I’ll be there for sure, once a manned mission comes along :D.

5 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI