India’s space program gets a huge budget boost

The competition heats up: The new budget of India’s new conservative government under Narendra Modi has given its space program a 50 percent increase.

It appears that there were increases across the board, including a gigantic increase for their GSLV rocket as well as their manned program.

It also appears that Modi is following in the path of George Bush, at least when it comes to space. He might be a conservative, pro private enterprise and anti-big government, but his approach to building a space industry is decidedly Soviet in style, pumping funds into government agencies so that they can build the rockets and spacecraft. For the moment at least, private companies will be the servants to India’s government space program, not the masters.

In the U.S. and Russia this approach worked for the first generation of rockets and spacecraft, but then ended up a lead weight for later generations. I suspect we shall see the same history play out in India.

India’s new prime minister to watch rocket launch.

The competition heats up: The new prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, will watch the next commercial launch of his country’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)

Modi would be called a tea party candidate in the U.S. He is very pro-capitalism and business. And though he has said he is very pro-space, I do wonder what he thinks of the commercial efforts of India’s space agency ISRO. ISRO is developing its rockets in an effort to capture international market share. It is as if NASA built the Falcon 9 and was trying to make money selling its use to private satellite companies.

I would not be surprised if Modi decides eventually to privatize this operation, taking the rocket development and commercial launches out of the hands of the government.

India and Narendra Modi: Freedom’s New Trumpet?

India and Narendra Modi: Freedom’s new trumpet?

What so many seem loath to accept is that India’s voters have dealt a massive, perhaps even final blow to a near 100-year failed investment in socialist economics. Modi’s [political party] and Modi himself are both emphatically pro-free market and were decisively elected in large measure due to their promise to free up India’s economy. Modi’s free market credentials were hard for even his harshest critics to gainsay. As three-term Chief Minister, or governor, of India’s most prosperous state Gujarat, Modi showed India and the world that indeed it was possible to replace the sclerosis of India’s hidebound bureaucratic morass with a thriving growth and prosperity.

India’s population has strongly recognized the value of freedom and individual achievement and rejected big government. If only this lesson could be learned here in the U.S.