India's Chandrayaan-3 becomes the first space mission to land near the south pole of the Moon

boem@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 281 points –
Chandrayaan-3 live: India's Vikram lander makes historic Moon landing - BBC News
bbc.com
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An amazing accomplishment. Lots of bad news recently but this definitely goes into the good pile.

All it took for them to afford the PR mission was decades of ignoring starving children!

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00067-6/fulltext

Don't worry, India has a caste system so they made sure the "right" kids didn't starve...

The prevalence of Zero-Food in India marginally declined from 20.0% (95% CI: 19.3%–20.7%) in 1993 to 17.8% (95% CI: 17.5%–18.1%) in 2021. There were considerable differences in the trajectories of change in the prevalence of Zero-Food across states. Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, and Jammu and Kashmir experienced high increase in the prevalence of Zero-Food over this time period, while Nagaland, Odisha, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh witnessed a significant decline. In 2021, Uttar Pradesh (27.4%), Chhattisgarh (24.6%), Jharkhand (21%), Rajasthan (19.8%) and Assam (19.4%) were states with the highest prevalence of Zero-Food. As of 2021, the estimated number of Zero-Food children in India was 5,998,138, with the states of Uttar Pradesh (28.4%), Bihar (14.2%), Maharashtra (7.1%), Rajasthan (6.5%), and Madhya Pradesh (6%) accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total Zero-Food children in India. Zero-Food in 2021 was concerningly high among children aged 6–11 months (30.6%) and substantial even among children aged 18–23 months (8.5%). Overall, socioeconomically advantaged groups had lower prevalence of Zero-Food than disadvantaged groups.

Pretty sure those two things are unrelated. It's possible to do science, and have social safety nets. Let's at least not be disingenuous here about the issue.

Especially when ISRO's entire budget is less than half of one per cent of India's federal government budget. Uttar Pradesh's government budget alone is fifty times ISRO's.

Oh...

You think they have the money/resources to do both and just choose not to help those areas filled with the people on the bottom rung of India's caste system?

I'll be honest, I didn't think Modi would be that evil... But your right, maybe he wants the children in those areas to starve to death and that's why his government won't help even tho they can

You're up on your high horse about it. But it does happen in other countries. No reason India would be different.

Bro has made it his life mission to talk shit about India and ISRO. I mean just look at this guy's comment history.

Quick edit:

That's weird, you go days without commenting and some of the most recent ones was also downplaying Modi letting lower caste children starve... I'm sure that has nothing to do with the Indian flag in your bio....

Easy block tho, I don't like far right extremists regardless of their country of origin.

recent ones was also downplaying Modi letting lower caste children starve…

Lol what?! When did I? Care to link the comment where I downplayed Modi letting children starve? You're straight up lying now, aren't you?

Aren't you the same guy who said India launching 104 satellites (96 of them were American in fact) in one go made "no logical sense" but was done just for PR? Aren't you also the same guy who said India is not capable of building a linux distro? (My brother in Christ, we just landed a fucking spacecraft on the moon 😂). Your disdain for my country couldn't be more blatant. And of course you had to label me a "far right extremist" for calling out your bullshit

There are children starving, why are you wasting money on an internet subscription? Or electricity for that matter. You monster. /s

Not sure how you can see any equivalence between necessary utilities and a space mission..

That would make sense if I was literally in charge of their welfare...

Or if I took money from their families to pay for moon missions

Or if I took money from their families to pay for moon missions

That's not how large democracies work, my friend. It's not some dictatorship they can instantly move money around to solve problems with. In fact India spends WAYYYYYY more on welfare than it does on ISRO. It's something like 2 billion USD to 250 billion USD. In fact the problem isn't just money its how its distributed, corruption, etc. If the Indian government decided to defund ISRO and put that money to welfare, it would be a tiny drop in a massive bucket. Defunding ISRO would also have major ramifications on their aerospace industry, many thousands would be out of jobs, those with higher educations would leave the country to find opportunities. Have you looked at how India is doing with abject poverty in the past 20 years? The graphs are all trending down. Is it perfect? absolutely not. Every country could do something better, India has a lot of things it needs to work on. In my opinion, building up its own indigienous space industry is a net positive for India and is not taking money away from poor people.

What I'm getting at is it's so easy to criticize a nation for their faults without looking at the complex socioeconomic and political issues at hand.

ISRO took the fuel efficient route. That's why a mission launched in July is landing now. Russia's crashed lander reached moon in ~13 days. They are already quite concious of spending their research grants wisely.

I'm surprised by these people who bring up their hatred filled political agenda at every opportunity. Why don't you go start an India bashing circle jerk community or instance and please remain there.

I’m surprised by these people who bring up their hatred filled political agenda

Yes...

Truly the issue isn't the far right religious extremists in charge of India...

It's people pointing out India's problems on social media.

What's millions of starving children from the "wrong" social caste when people's feelings are getting hurt?!

No one wants to see children starve. We can discuss that if you make a separate post about it backed with a reference to facts.

Hijacking this and every other post about Chandrayaan with anti-India politics is not the way. This post is about a scientific milestone and let all discussions be regarding that. Show some courtesy and you'll get better discussion on the points that you bring up.

Gaand mein khaega tu ab, chodu mal. Jaa rindia ja.

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The cost of Chandrayaan-3 was literally less than some of the recent film budgets. Hunger is an issue in India, but that won't be solved by cutting funds for science. In fact, the Indian government needs to be doing more to improve the scientific temper among the populace. There are a lot of things wrong with India, but ISRO is not one of them.

Man does not live by bread alone.

But without bread, the other shit is just set dressing on a corpse.

That’s only if you interpret the saying literally.

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