India's Mars Orbiter Mission loses contact, burns all fuel, deemed 'non-recoverable' India's Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter Mission has ended. The nation's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) yesterday published an outline of the proceedings of a September 27th meeting at which the state of the mission was discussed. The news was not good: communication with the orbiter was lost in April 2022, and ISRO staff believe …
Well here in lies the great debate about foreign aid. Most countries conflate the aid part with foreign policy. Many also with trade support to their own exporters. Hence you have aid being used to fund everything from worthy things like water purification, mosquito nets and education to air defense systems bought, mysteriously enough, from companies in the donor country.
Doesn't mean aid per se is a bad thing, nor that India doesn't deserve some (though there are possibly more deserving cases), but as a wise man once almost said:
International Development - you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy
Russia, USA, China can already launch people into space, India will do it in 2 years ... and what do we Europeans do ? When will WE be sending men into space ? (or women, or trans or whatever, I don't care) We are belittling and moralizing everyone about how to do and what not to do, and yet we're not even able to send someone into orbit ?
And in the mean time we sanction ourselves into oblivion so that the corrupt nutters can play dick-measuring contests (who can propose more sanctions on more countries : is there even something we didn't sanction yet ?). History will laugh at us, and our kids will ask : "What were you doing while the rest of the world conquered space ? ". And we will answer: "Ha ! WE had toilets for 5 genders ! AND we have taught Putin a lesson in how far we can go for shooting ourselves ! "
But ESA has been sending European astronauts to the ISS for years (but in American and Russian spacecraft)...and ESA have been involved in manufacturing many space satellites for years...and they have also been building rockets to launch these satellites as well.
So, you think they are falling behind because ESA has not sent their own astronauts into space in their own spacecraft using their own rockets. Such nit picking is unworthy !!
Now I have to admit I might be biased (being a native here and all that) but there is nowhere on God's good earth that it is better to be a woman, an ethnic or religious minority, gay or indeed (relatively speaking) poor. As for the 5 gendered toilets, jog on troll.
Much of western and central Europe (including the semi-detached UK) are just about the nicest place to live. And I for one am rather proud of that.
[retreats playing ode to joy on her ukulele]
If one ignores Poland, Hungary as being "East" - then the UK and Italy are both currently on a trajectory to negate various equality rights. I say this as a very disappointed UK person - the government is not out-of-tune with a worrying number of my neighbours and even friends.
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