Tuesday 5 November 2013

"India launches British taxpayers' money to Mars"

From the BBC:

India has successfully launched £1 billion of British taxpayer's money towards the Red Planet - with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to use UK funding to reach Mars.

The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country's east coast.

The head of India's space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to spend aid payments from Great Britain on reaching Mars orbit and to carry out experiments to test the limits of the former colonial master's patience.

The spacecraft is set to burn UK taxpayers' money for 300 days, reaching Mars orbit in 2014.

7 comments:

Graeme said...

I thought British "aid" was to help Indians combat the evil of climate change!

Hopper said...

Bill for replacement of coffee-soaked keyboard is in the post to you, MW. Superb.

Mark Wadsworth said...

G, a bit of space exploration, a bit of climate change combatting, they're hedging their bets.

H, thanks, but I'm not paying for the keyboard as the post wasn't actually supposed to be funny ;-)

Bayard said...

What puzzles me is why Dave and the Gang continue to send aid to India. What powerful interest group is benefitting from all this aid? "Cui bono?" as the lawyers say.

Anonymous said...

If the software on the probe was written and tested by the three Indian companies I have the misfortune to deal with it is probably heading for Neptune

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I'd love to know. Political correctness?

Anon, tee hee, but Neptune is quite a long way away, so that defers the point in time at which the whole thing has proveably gone disastrously wrong :-)

Bayard said...

No, no. PC doesn't make someone rich even richer and that's what state aid is really about, isn't it?
I mean, if it was really going to the poor of India, it would be like welfare here in the UK and be first in the line for cuts. The fact that the aid budget has been ring fenced proves that it is benefiting powerful interest groups.