- The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle containing the Mars Orbiter Mission Spacecraft at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.
India will today launch a spacecraft to go to Mars. If successful, it will be have beaten China and Japan to the Red Planet.
The satellite will take more than 10 months to reach Martian orbit and begin beaming information back to Earth.
The mission, which will cost $73 million, generated a lot of the debate on The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook page and on the comments page of the WSJ website. Much of the discussion centered around whether a country where hundreds of millions of people live below the poverty line should be spending its money in outer space rather than on terrestrial issues. Here is what some readers said:
Kishor Shah, wrote in the comments on WSJ.com that the money spent on the space race could be better spent on basic human needs. “India would do well to figure out how to provide infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports and sea ports,” according to Mr. Shah.
Linda H. Conley, a Twitter user, also questioned the prudence of an Indian mission to Mars.
However others, including Raksha Tripathi on wsj.com, praised the scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation for doing a “fabulous job in completing this project at a record speed and budget.”
Sunil Shivarao commented on the WSJ Facebook page, that the mission was an “outstanding achievement for a country which is struggling to overcome lots of problems.” He added that their main objective is not to find aliens but to get “weather report to farmers, natural disaster warnings and free online education to remote locations.”
Facebook user Vijay Aradhya wrote that this mission marked “the ambitions of the emerging superpower.”
For Jeffrey Dugas, the voyage was a step in the right direction because Earth’s limited resources are being used up fast, and “the future of Mankind’s survival lies beyond this insignificant ball of dust.”
WSJ Reader Palaniappan Rajaram agreed with that sentiment. “If India were to feed its masses before doing anything else, not one bit of science will be done in the country. When the rest of the world is moving forward, we will end up having a society which is not only hungry but also scientifically lagging,” he wrote.
On a lighter note, Twitter user Prerna Sinha had this to say about the mission.
One reader, Amit Chandrasaid that Asians had been to Mars before. “The fact is if you go by Vadic scriptures and look up “vimana shastra” one will realize Indians many 10,000 of years ago have been all over the universe !” he wrote on the WSJ Facebook page.
Another Facebook user, Aryan Visionaire Realty, pointed to the international race to Mars. “Would be nice if it wasn’t a rivalry, instead all nations worked together in exploring the universe. To aliens we’re all monkeys no matter what nationality,” he wrote
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