From Knowledge@Wharton:
In India as in other countries, the Muslim faithful wait for a glimpse of the moon to start their Eid al-Fitr celebrations. At the end of October, it will be the country’s scientific community looking moonward. During a narrow temporal window beginning October 22, the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh plans to launch the Chandrayaan-I, the country’s first moon mission. (“Chandrayaan” means “trip to the moon” in Hindi.) If the weather plays spoilsport, the launch could be postponed until December.
Critics of the country’s space program would prefer that the unmanned launch be postponed indefinitely. Their complaints? First, that India is just reinventing the wheel: The moon mission proposes to do what other countries already have done. Second, that India is a poor country. Aren’t there many other ways to put the funding the launch requires — Rs. 386 crore (US$80 million) — to better use?
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it needs to begin somewhere…if the funds are not used, they just might lie and rot and nothing may anyways come out of it…besides there are a lot of funds already which could do with MUCH better utilisation!!
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