Will India beat NASA back to the moon?

At a forthcoming meeting of the country's top scientists on November 7, ISRO will, for the first time, unveil two of its ambitious plans - to send an Indian into space around 2014 and then to have one walk on the moon about six years later. Both missions will be accomplished without any foreign assistance. ISRO will even find a Sanskrit word equivalent for the US's 'astronaut' and Russia's 'cosmonaut' to describe the Indian in space.

They seem to be taking the same high-cost approach, though, so I'm not sure where this will lead, or how affordable it will ultimately be. Of course, they also have to avoid a nuclear war with Pakistan.

Sounds like your typical national prestige manned spaceflight program (as if there were any other kind, yet), though at a faster pace than China's overly cautious program. It's certainly a much riskier program than China's, and I think that reveals some of the cultural differences between India and China and some of the similarities between India and the west. It is, of course, too early to tell how realistic their time table is, a manned lunar landing is a bit of a technological and industrial challenge, even today and India hasn't proven much of its spaceflight capabilities yet. I put their chances at getting to the stage of manned lunar flybys pretty high though.

If anything, these new government spaceflight programs (NASA's new program, India's program, China's program) should provide interesting context for the development of a free-market manned spaceflight industry.

I am not one to be so bold as to say they will never do it in the time they've set but if you look at some of their defense projects (domestic surface to air missiles, domestic tanks) that have been languishing for as long as 20 years you have to wonder if they aren't a little over ambitious.

Cecil, you raise a good point about their military projects, however I think the reason for that is that is the perception that no matter what the Indians do it is usually better and cheaper to buy such "relatively" off the shelf military components like Tanks and SAMS.

But Moon Rockets and Nukes, that another kettle of fish as you just can't buy that stuff form the LockMart catalog. So while its probably an ambitious timetable I don't seem to doubt their chances for success.

I understand what you're saying William but in this case the Indian SAM/Tank don't just not work as well as other SAMs/Tanks, they simply do not work well period.

Tanks are a much simpler technology than spacecraft, especially manned spacecraft intended to land on the Moon. So, I know this is simplistic, I have to wonder(paraphrasing Guss Grissom) "If you can't build a tank that works how are you going to go to the Moon?"

Past performance isn't a sure sign of future performance but is as good a measure as you'll likely find.

As I understand it, the reason the phrase "Past performance may not be indicative of future results." has meaning in mutual funds and other investments because of survivor bias. The funds with a bad history no longer exist. Countries don't have that problem to the same degree. The country has to make a huge mistake in order to cease to exist.

Who said anything about India ceasing to exist Karl? Must have been Mr Strawman.

But India has not been successful in its attempts at domestically designing and building a modern tank, a surface to air missile system or a jet fighter in roughly 20 years of trying. What makes anyone believe they can go from never having putting a human in space to walking on the Moon in 14 years?

Like I stated in my first post, I'll not say it is impossible but judging from their other attempts at certain technical challenges the prospects certainly look dim.

I just saw Virendi Kumar, Counsellor for Space at the Indian Embassy in D.C. speak at the AAS/AIAA conference on Global Objectives for Space Exploration where he outlined India's future space programs. The only thing he mentioned about future lunar plans was Chandrayaan-2 which is an orbiter /lander mission scheduled to launch in 2011. He was asked by the audience specifically about manned programs and stated that they do not have the funding to undertake such an ambitious program at this time.

So its interesting this article came out as it directly contradicts what he told the reps from NASA that were in the audience. Though the part of ISRO going it alone was echoed in some of his ppt when he talked about the need for ISRO to focus on developing its own workforce.

"But prior to that much needs to be done down on earth. ISRO will have to design and roll out equipment, including a space capsule. A training centre — with a zero gravity chamber- too has to be constructed."

If the Indians can manage to construct a "zero gravity chamber", getting to the moon should be no problem.