I think its a big mistake to continue with this policy. It doesn't seem like the Indian satellite/missile programs are dependent on revenue from commercial launches (although it doesn't hurt, for sure), so they will continue regardless. But by making use of them, US corporations can get the benefit of R&D paid for by Indian taxpayers, for free. Besides which, I think it would lead to better cooperation and understanding between the 2 countries in this very important area.

Maybe the line shouldn't be drawn at rockets, but unless you think we should have free & open markets for nuclear weapons I daresay you think the line should be drawn somewhere.

There is also the issue of maintaining the capability domestically. If someone else is too cheap it would destroy the local capability. Imagine the US losing the ability to launch it's own satellites - like it lost the ability to launch people.

That said, there needs to be a way to make domestic launches competitive, so helping SpaceX or others while blocking foreign competition seem like a good idea all around. The goal should be to maintain domestic capability while hindering foreign nukes - not to maintain some company monopoly.

And in any case both of those are less sensitive technologies - a transport plane that other countries sell equivalents to, and a previous-generation fighter plane for which India is in any case the largest expected purchaser (the production lines in the US are being wound down, and the move to India would be part of a purchase by the IAF), and to etch the US has already approved sales.

We wouldn't sell India a Minuteman, so we're sure as hell not going to find their development of an equivalent.

We came pretty close to that brink after not bothering to invest in our own engine development. Makes the quarterly reports look great though.

The US has not remotely lost the ability to launch people in the context you're suggesting (lost knowledge, lost budget, lost political will). Its literally between launch systems. No knowledge or budget has been lost. On top of it, its doing what no other nation seems able to do, spark a space race between corporations with their own goals and cost-cutting measures. That's on top of NASA's incredible record of space science missions and robotic missions in the interim.

As far as the RD-180 issue goes, ULA buys those engines and re-packages them into domestic launch vehicles that create domestic jobs and keep the majority of the profits local. There's a big difference both practically and politically between this and having a foreign company launch your satellites. So India is not being treated that differently here.

That said, RD-180 purchasing is being phased out. The Delta IV is being retired and that only leaves the Atlas V, which I believe is no longer allowed to buy new engines since an earlier sale this year. That's on top of the Pentagon approving $162m to help fund the AR1 and BE-4 engines which will ultimately replace the RD-180 for the ULA.

NASA has failed at how many launch system projects since the Space Shuttle?

(Assuming you learn from your failures)

India is now part of MCTR (Missile Control Technology Regime) that limits ICBM development. So that's no longer a valid concern. Also, India has done well without the assistance of the US in space technology and will continue to do so. So if the US doesn't want to assist in technology, it's not going to be a show stopper for India. It will continue to eat at the small satellite launch business.

That's regime sounds like a great intent, but the simple fact is that taking a satellite launching rocket, replacing the satellite with a nuke, and aiming it back at the ground somewhere is trivial.

ICBMs use much more stable fuels so they can sit in a silo for years on end. This requires totally different engines and fuel tanks.

tldr: You can't just stick a nuke on top of a liquid fueled rocket and use it like an ICBM.

The point of MCTR is to prevent a nation from openly admitting they have such a weapon and hence it can not be used as an argument in any future negotiations.

1) Their no-first-use policy

2) Pakistan already having nuclear weapons

For example I never understood USA providing F16s to Pakistan. It is nothing but USA's attempts to escalate the tensions.

Trivial for a nation-state is different than trivial for a person. A nation like India could accidentally lose the amount of money required to hire a team of 20 to do the engineering to mount a working nuke to a working rocket.

Intentionally paying and assembling that same team would be trivial for a nation like India, USA, China or Russia. It could be as simple as a single line item on some military spending bill.

A treaty does provide a way for bureaucrats and ambassadors to meddle with, discuss and possibly prevent that attack in advance... if they know about it.

Mounting a working nuke to a working rocket can easily be done in secret by a small team.

Neither adhere to a no-first-use doctrine. That means that they reserve the right to scorch the world with nuclear fire, in response to an attack by conventional weapons.

It's hard to pin down exactly how disproportionate this level of hubris is.

The decades of arms reductions still put the arsenals of either the US, or Russia at ~10 times that of India and Pakistan combined.

At least India has a no-first-use policy. I'm not saying things are better in that conflict, but this is the pot calling the kettle black.

While the odds of nuclear conflict between them may be lower then the odds of one between India and Pakistan (And this is an arguable point), it will be incredibly more devastating.

As such, it's incredibly disingenuous to claim that New Delhi has it's thumb on the doomsday button, but that Moscow or Washington don't.

So much sensationalism in this comment! It's like watching a sensationalist news channel. Anyone who follows India-Pakistan politics know that nuclear war is unlikely. Neither of them can afford another war.

The "realistic" situation is that unless nuclear weapons end up in the hands of terrorists in Pakistan, there is no real nuclear threat.

India will build any technology that it needs given sufficient time and money. Time is not something that USA has anymore. It's global influence is only going go down with time.

At least in my opinion it makes lot more sense for USA to see India as a potential borrowed knife/insurance against China and help her have good defense capabilities as well as build strong economic ties across all possible avenues.

It appears that trade and economic exchange is a much more important factor to avoid full scale war than anything else.

If you can enrich uranium then you can build an ICBM - it takes a lot of good engineering talent and very expensive equipment for either project. Unless you can somehow get another state to sell you the necessary stuff... but I'd consider purchasing uranium enrichment centrifuges vs purchasing ICBMs to be similarly highly-sketchy endeavours (the ICBM more so, but only because it can be used more or less immediately).

http://spacenews.com/customers-of-indias-pslv-rocket-say-ind...

I think the idea that it's primarily a security concern is very misleading.

Protectionism can always, always be framed as a matter of national security.

So imagine that what you're trying to achieve is this:

Allow companies that want to use rockets for their business purposes to buy capacity from other countries when your local capacity is maxed out, but don't take money off the table of your local capacity which is using that revenue to drive development and research. That is what the treaty was all about, can you imagine what would happen if the Chinese (for example) subsidized rocket launches for third parties like they have solar cells, or rare earth materials? Nobody would pay full price for launches locally, there would be no local business, and local rocket companies would shut down. (We've already seen this in other businesses) Now China decides to no longer sell those services or raise the price astronomically? (remember they did that with rare earth materials?) Now you are in a really tight situation. The whole RD-180 engine issue is exactly this problem.

Challenging indeed. So India could "fix" this by signing on to the treaty and agreeing to the restrictions. They choose not to it seems (I have no idea why) and so they are excluded. Is that a US policy failure or an India policy failure?

Indians are fiercely proud of their space program, which is in opinion a wonderful feat in terms of technology. Their main objective is to use it for Indian interests, like Oceans, weather and defence etc. They've no interest in pursuing extra business, if it comes at the cost of bowing down to US stipulations. They're getting nice business from many countries in the world like Germany, France, African nations etc.

Source : I've read "Wings of fire" by APJ Kalam, which gives an interesting insiders view into ISRO/DRDO.

Also I'm not sure how much it matters in this case but India only joined the Missile Technology Control Regime a few months ago whereas Russia signed it a long time ago and China has agreed to abide by the original guidelines and applied for full membership in 2004.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...

That's a bit of rewriting of history right there.

I suppose you will claim that India's involvement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Dadra_and_Nagar_... was simply connivance and instigation by the government, not active participation by the Indian military? But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Portuguese_India was definitely the Indian military, not just random groups supported by the government.

You could argue that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War#Indi... was an instance of Pakistan attacking first, but note that India was actively arming and training insurgents inside what was at the time Pakistan. So it's hard to claim that this is an instance of Pakistani aggression without at the same time viewing the fairly symmetric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 as an instance of Indian aggression. Personally, I would consider the latter as Pakistani aggression, and the former as Indian aggression....

It's also hard to say who was the aggressor in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siachen_conflict because both sides were acting basically equivalently as far as I can tell.

The first and second article you link to is Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence. At that time, India was not even a nuclear power.

The third article (about Bangladesh liberation) was not because "India was actively arming and training insurgents inside what was at the time Pakistan". Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

The issue was that Pakistan itself was an aggressor which caused massive migration crisis (similar to what is happening now in Syria). With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict. Even to this day there are hundreds of thousands of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who have settled in India (who fled from the atrocities of East Pakistan).

About Siachen conflict: What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor? I really think you have superficial understanding of India's policy towards it's neighbors.

I can counter all your points with just 1 point: During the 1971 Indo-Pak war (with Pakistan as the clear aggressor), Indian army not just defeated Pakistan, but it also marched all the way to Lahore, Pakistan and occupied parts of Lahore. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

India could have kept the occupied territory to itself (like how Pakistan has done with Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir and China with parts of Arunachal). However, it chose to honor a ceasefire agreement that was about to be signed (Note: "about to be signed". Pakistan continues to violate that ceasefire agreement to this day) and returned parts of the city of Lahore back to Pakistan. Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

We also returned 90,000 odd war prisoners to Pakistan with dignity and respect (Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_(1971)_pris...). See a video of the surrender here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6qymVwkVA

Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Probably true. I need to read up on almost every topic in existence.

> Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence

Please see my response to AkshayGenius at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866503

> At that time, India was not even a nuclear power

That's not relevant to the veracity of the "was never the aggressor" claim, which was not conditioned on nuclear anything.

> Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

It's possible that the sources cited in Wikipedia for this claim are all Pakistani propaganda, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukti_Bahini#cite_note-47 doesn't obviously look like it to me.

> With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict.

Now we are back to deciding at what point national interest justifies military action, yes?

I'm not claiming the action was not justified, because I do not have sufficient knowledge to make that determination. But the original post I replied to wasn't talking about "justified" aggression either.

> What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, and maybe in this case it's not, then the situation here was as follows:

1) The territory in question was disputed, and not generally permanently occupied by either side.

2) Pakistan was granting permission to mountaineering expeditions into the territory, based on various maps claiming that parts of the territory were in Pakistan as opposed to correctly showing that the border was not agreed on.

3) India responded by sending a military-sponsored (but not clear whether "military" in the sense of "armed") expedition .

4) Pakistan decided to establish a more permanent military presence in the area.

5) India found out about this plan and acted first to move its military into the area.

6) Pakistan attempted to dislodge the Indian troops.

etc. As I said, hard to decide who exactly is the aggressor here, as in most slowly-escalating disputed-area conflicts.

> I can counter all your points with just 1 point

I think you misunderstood my points. You seem to be responding to a strawman "India is an aggressive country out to get its neighbors" claim that I never made. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I think India has done a pretty good job of not being a military aggressor, and I think Pakistan has clearly been the aggressor a number of times in wars with India. I also think the claim that India was _never_ an aggressor is wrong.

> You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

That's about the 1965 war, not the 1971 one. It also says India did not occupy Lahore, though it did get quite close to doing so. But to your larger point....

> Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

Assuming we're still talking about the 1965 war, Wikipedia's article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 claims:

"Hostilities between the two countries ended after a United Nations mandated ceasefire was declared following diplomatic intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration."

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965#Cea... talks about some of the same.

If we're talking about that situation, then the 1956 capture and return of the Gaza Strip and Sinai by Israel is a similar situation.

Going a bit further back in time, Prussia returned almost all of the territory that it controlled at the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1872, though they extracted a monetary indemnity for doing so. Even further back, in 1814 the Sixth Coalition restored the territorial integrity of France after exiling Napoleon.

Again, India acted honorably here, and such actions are reasonably rare. They're not unique.

> Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Sure. At the end of World War I, millions of POWs were released by the various belligerents. Numbers from back then are not very reliable, but http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_o... lists somewhere in the 300k-400k range for just German prisoners of war held in France.

Returning prisoners of war at the end of the conflict is the _normal_ thing that happens. Not always, of course; an obvious counterexample is the Soviet Union after World War II, and to a lesser extent the other Allies at the end of that war. But nevertheless, it's the expected behavior. Obviously it's to India's credit that it did that, but it's a much lower bar than the return of territory, in my view.

Quite easily. The claim was that India was never the aggressor, not that all the aggressions were justified by some extenuating circumstance or national interest or whatnot. The "never the aggressor" claim clearly doesn't hold for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Portuguese_India. I'm not saying that India shouldn't have done it, note, just that India has in fact used military aggression when it felt its national interests warrant it, which is perfectly normal for nation-states.

We can have a long discussion about whether we expect such situations, where national interests are judged to warrant military aggression, to arise in the future. But that's a discussion that should be had, not dismissed by appealing to untrue claims about history.

> It was the only time India had to resort to military action

Did you stop reading halfway though my comment?

Seriously, I think India has done a quite good job, as nation-states go, at not attacking its neighbors. But claiming things like "it was the only time India had to resort to military action" just doesn't look like it's supported by the facts to me. "One of the few times", yes.

I understand what you're saying, but I feel the "aggressor" is the party that first commits an unwarranted action. India was in the process of decolonization and the Portuguese refused to leave, despite prior repeated non-violent requests. If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

That right there is a problem at the heart of the concept of "aggressor": what time point do we pick as the baseline such that actions that lead to changes after that are aggression but actions before that are the status quo?

This played out in Europe with Alsace-Lorraine, where the Germans felt that the French took it away from them in 1919, while the French felt that the Germans took it away from them in 1871 and they just recovered it in 1919. Oh, but the Germans felt like the French had taken that territory away from them in the 17th and 18th century...

This is obviously a situation that is somewhat different from that of the Portuguese possessions in India. But it highlights the fact that "unwarranted" can be hard to define objectively. In practice, it tends to get defined by the victors writing the history books, though nowadays it can get decided by self-determination referenda and _then_ the victors (possibly of the referendum, possibly of resulting armed conflicts) writing history books.

From our point of view at the beginning of the 21st century, the Portuguese possession of Goa in the mid-20th was unwarranted but the British possession of the Falklands right now is... well, depends on whom you ask, but generally considered warranted. How much of that is because the population of the Falklands is happy being British subjects, and how much is because the British won the Falklands War? I wish I knew. :(

> If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

No, I would not. But this isn't a perfect analogy either. I think it would be _very_ apt as an analogy if India had gotten a UN resolution that the Portuguese need to leave; even more so if UN security forces then threw the Portuguese out. Yes, I realize that this was not realistic at the time, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was the US explicitly saying it would veto any such resolution, if I read the history correctly.

But as it was, the situation is more akin to the owner of the property being trespassed on seeing that the courts and the police won't help him out and personally kicking the trespasser off the property. Would that be described as "aggression"? It starts to depend on your biases, especially if the trespasser had been there for a while. This last is why the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession exists in English common law, so arguments over squatting and tresspassing won't continue ad infinitum. To some extent this gets applied in the international arena. Of course it doesn't always; then you get wars over territorial changes that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago; no shortage of those in recent history.

Anyway, at the time, there were a number of countries that condemned the Indian military action, including some which in principle supported the idea that the Portuguese possessions in India should become part of India. That is, they felt that the ends were good, but that the means were in fact military aggression and needed to be called out as such. We could try to fit that sort of dynamic into the individual trespasser being removed scenario; that would involve there being a dispute about whether the trespasser was in fact now more like a squatter, as well as dispute about whether forceful removal now, as opposed to peaceful removal, or at least removal by police, after some period of time gaining support for the removal was the better course of action...

Where all that leaves me personally is that I consider violent attacks on a previously broadly accepted status quo as "aggression" but I then have to allow that some "aggression" must be morally acceptable when the status quo either was unjust or has become unjust and no other solutions are available. Unfortunately, "unjust" is not an objective judgement either. :(

The situation with the Portuguese possessions falls into the "has become unjust" bucket for me, assuming the population of those areas wanted the Portuguese out. The Portuguese did not put this to a vote at the time, which is somewhat telling; I'm willing to assume based on time period and general zeitgeist that in fact the population did want them out.

Of course I would be happier to assume that sort of thing if I didn't know about counterexamples like the Falklands and Gibraltar. :( But as a point of comparison, Gibraltar _did_ have a vote on the matter in 1967, which is a pretty similar timeframe; presumably the Portuguese didn't put things to a vote because they were fairly certain they would lose.

Not just the point in time, there's also the level of aggression. Many wars have a set of ever-increasing nonmilitary conflicts leading up to them. If you're not defining aggression as a concrete military action, you have to choose a baseline for this too.

If you're allowing governmental-agression-that-may-incite-war to be counted as a "first aggression", then India is doing this right now in Kashmir. Yes, I know, that situation is more complex (and I'd prefer not to discuss it online; there's a lot of nuance lost and it's frustrating), but there are similarities in the situation.

----

Anyway, the definition of "aggression" to be used in this context depends on the context of the original statement, which was the argument that India is less likely to be a security threat because it has never been the aggressor. In this context, it is about military aggression, the argument being that a country more likely to escalate a civil issue to war is more likely to escalate to nukes in this modern age. To be clear, I don't feel that India is at all likely to escalate to nukes, due to various other reasons (including possibly personal bias). But I don't think that "India was never the first aggressor" is a valid argument in support of that.

By the latter, if country A is arming/training/providing insurgents in country B with no previous attacks by B on A, then A is the aggressor. So in the eastern Ukraine case Russia would be the aggressor.

In fact, annexing another country's territory without any provocation is pretty much the definition of "a war of aggression".

Civil wars are hard to classify in terms of "who is the aggressor", but none of my examples were civil wars.

The American Revolution can plausibly be argued to be a US aggression, but it doesn't really match any of my examples either.

Of course I would never make the totally daft claim that the US was never the aggressor in a military action, since that claim is quite obviously and demonstrably false.

Of course I never claimed you did, I just made a clever remark.

It's a hard call. For example, is it more of an analogue for the fighting in New York, or more of an analogue for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Quebec_(1775) ? Would your answer be different if the Continental Army had managed to hold on to Quebec and it had become part of the United States?

Or, given the time lags involved in both cases, is it more like the US invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, which I view as a US war of aggression? Again, that invasion failed, but had it succeeded would that make it less a war of aggression?

Note that there is a significant difference here in that the US that was invading Canada in 1812 had no reasonable claim along the lines "we are all one polity that was just colonized by different people and should be a single state" to justify its attempt to annex part of Canada. But that same issue applies to the rest of the war of independence too.

It's admirable that while the China obtained its tech from USSR, India led by Homi Bhabha used a civilian Canadian reactor to do it all by themselves.

Uh, what? This is complete bullshit. Where do you get this kind of garbage from?

China and Russia are already cats out of the bag. Other more sophisticated means are required where they are concerned

It is also possible they are not entirely out of the bag and pushing them out may not be a desirable goal.

Critics and advocates of American economic policy like to label it as capitalist and / or free-market (like there's a difference), but it's really not.

For one major example, consider the incredible level of restriction on immigration.

> India's Mars mission, with a budget of $73 million, is far cheaper than comparable missions including NASA's $671 million Maven satellite that is expected to set off for Mars later in November. Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/04/243082266/...

For failure rate comparison: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6838079/india-mars-mangalyaan

Now, if you compare launch costs, you get a better feel for the differences. Those were about $43 million (MOM) to $187 million (MAVEN). But MAVEN was almost twice the mass.

SpaceX will give you a Falcon 9 Full Thrust launch, fixed price, for $62 million, which can launch something twice as big as MAVEN to Mars.

So SpaceX and India are price competitive on a kilogram-to-GTO basis.

Mark to market applies as much to space technology as it does to credit default swaps.

Wait till PSLV delivers Aditya-1[1][2] to L1.

[1] http://www.isro.gov.in/aditya-l1-first-indian-mission-to-stu...

[2] http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/aditya-1.htm

My point stands: SpaceX needs to get to Mars once before we can start calling them serious interplanetary contenders.

What are Indians going to do when there few good colleges.

Scientist/Engineer ₹802,100 Scientist/Engineer ₹798,473

So, 800k rupee is about $12,000 USD. NASA's avg engineer salary is 10x that.

edit: NASA employees also get generous government benefits like pensions and such. Federal employee benefits are the envy of the nation. Not sure why you people are arguing against basic facts here. Salaries, cost of living, etc are a fraction in India compared to the states. Thus you can't compare project costs.

Given all this, it's not clear how long ISRO will be able to hold on to its first mover advantage, with regards to cheap launches. While INR being undervalued may be one advantage, it may not prove to be enough to compensate for bad logistics and attrition. Admittedly though, the latter are not as big problems for ISRO, as they are for manufacturing companies.

If there are folks from ISRO here on HN, I'd love to know about their management/coding practices and the like. In any case, the whole "defense" line is a non-sequitur

- Everyone knows that the Indian bureaucracy leaks like a sewer.

- DRDO is hardly an organization that needs fearing; apart from the above anecdotal data, most of the components/tech used by the organization are imported. A Homi Bhabha is not apparent in the current state apparatus.

- The state has hardly had any real geopolitical goals (after Nehru-Indira Gandhi).

[1] Haldane called CSIR, "Center for the suppression of independent research".

I don't think I will change your opinion ; I just want to point out to anyone who might take you seriously that you are full of shit.

First of all, there are a whole lot of talented engineers in India, simply because of the population itself. Few go to the top colleges that you speak of and graduating from there doesn't necessarily mean they are the "best". So you can't take a lack of graduates from those colleges as a sign of lack of competence.

Next, good institutions can take even "mediocre" people and enable them to do great work (Notice that I use "enable" and not "guarantee"). ISRO seems to have created such a culture, and as long as that tradition/culture continues, it should continue to do very well.

That however does not contradict the fact that India's exam system also filters out a lot of smart people, and trains them really well... most of whom have historically have left for the US.

From your comment, one can only say that you have 0 knowledge about India/culture and DRDO, you are entitled to have an opinion but please don't have opinions based on incorrect facts/assumptions.

>Given all this, it's not clear how long ISRO will be able to hold on to its first mover advantage, with regards to cheap launches

It isn't "first mover advantage". The term for it is being nimble. ISRO/DRDO run a lot like startups who have little funding, they have brilliant scientists who want to SERVE the nation, also there is no other org you'd work after you leave ISRO/DRDO, there is no Lockheed Martin equivalent in India!

>DRDO is hardly an organization that needs fearing; apart from the above anecdotal data

What data? It isn't just about DRDO, you don't need to "fear" India, don't you know that there have been so many terror attacks on Indian soil and India has never retaliated, only now have we done a surgical strike. So yeah, you never have to fear India at all. If you ignore the "invasion" of Goa when the Indian union was relatively new (and the Shri Vijaya Kingdom which extended to Malaysia) India never attacked another country and it won't, because now, the country faces much larger problems, and India never was territory hungry.

>- The state has hardly had any real geopolitical goals (after Nehru-Indira Gandhi). Yes, it doesn't.

Also, programming isn't as mainstream in India as it is in the US.

Why is there so much country-based regulation in these fields? Is it because the traditional patriotism associated with the field (US vs Russia in the 60's was legendary)? or is it simply resistance to change?

Not so long ago in the UK you had to have both sets of grandparents as citizens to Join the civil service.

Not all rockets are practical as ICBMs. ICBMs tend to use storable (hypergolic) propellants so they can be maintained and ready to launch at short interval. Many space launch vehicles, such as those built by SpaceX, use cryogenic propellants and need to go through a time consuming (and dangerous!) propellant loading before they can be launched. (note: the Indian and the Chinese space programs use primarily solid fuel and hypergolic propellants)

I'm sure SpaceX, ULA and others would be happy to recruit non-US citizens if the regulations didn't disallow it.

Also, China's new Long March 5/6/7 rocket series reduces Chinese use of hypergolic fuels to a minimum. All 3 have now launched at least once.

I'm not sure if there are similar restrictions to the US that apply to working aerospace industry jobs (say Airbus).

There are. Hence my initial message ^^

Because same rocket technology could be used to either put a robot on the Moon, or a nuke in someone's backyard on another continent.

Other than logistics cost NASA's rockets have much higher payloads (think 100 tons vs 10 tons), number of rockets available, number of satellites launched into space (but I think ISRO technically has a better success rate), deep space missions and research(ISRO recently sent its first MARS rover), space stations, manned missions, NASA is also involved in aeronautics, and robots/rovers. Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-NASA-an...

Somehow the article fails to mention the burgeoning defense relationship between India and the United States, and the US imperatives to build out regional challengers and opposition to a China that is growing in power.

This is pretty common in the US press, and leads many of the people inside the country both to evaluate criteria with highly theoretical economic dogmas and to assess their country as both apolitical and unstrategic.

> Indian Space Research Organization has consistently punched above its modest weight class, racking up a series of cheap and practical achievements.

Aren't we using Russian RD-180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180 engines which also seemed to punch above their weight class. Allegedly it was hard it believe it was possible to run engine at that efficiency level.

I don't think professionals were that much surprized. George Sutton (author of an encyclopedia on the subject, https://www.amazon.com/History-Liquid-Propellant-Engines-Lib...) writes: "The history of liquid propellant rocket engines (LPREs) in the former Soviet Union is remarkable because they have developed a larger variety and a larger number of LPREs than any other nation and the number of their LPREs that have flown is considerably higher than that of any other country." http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.6943 So having RD-180 performing as they do could be rather expected.

I'm not sure how that compares to the (liquid fueled) RD-180 in terms of efficiency, but it's a very different type of engine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCE-200

On the other hand, India's Mars Orbiter Mission has been the lowest cost successful Mars mission to date, so they are not exactly slouches.

SpaceX is developing technology that makes "space travel cheaper" not "deploying small satellites cheaper". Both fall into different categories altogether.

Hence I believe you are seriously mistaken about competitiveness of pay in ISRO. It is not feasible for the government to pay at the same scale as large multi national private companies to all it's workforce. India is just not rich enough.

Even top level bureaucrat jobs like "Cabinet Secretary to the Government of India" don't get paid a lot compared to what salaries are like in the West.

ISRO pays competitive salaries for engineers. At least as per Indian pay scale. Most ISRO scientists/engineers lead a comfortable life. You can't compare the pay scale of a SpaceX/NASA employee with that of ISRO employee because the economies of both countries are vastly different. Also, SpaceX/NASA wouldn't hire Indian scientists/engineers in bulk to make it competitive anyways. So where is the question of competitive salaries?

"It will be interesting to see what ISRO's costs look like when increased salaries ripple through their workforce."

It won't make any difference. ISRO is a completely profitable enterprise for the Indian government. So even if the salaries are increased it won't make any impact on profits.

"BTW there are several startups targeting small satellites. One is the Electron rocket from Rocket Labs. There's also the European Vega rocket, and Japan's Epsilon rocket. SpaceX has already had one launch purchased by a company that groups together small satellites to launch together.[1]"

Yeah but these companies don't have the same track record as ISRO does. I checked the companies you mentioned and the launches range from 1-15 in the past decade with quite a few failed attempts. ISRO on the other hand has had 56 launches with only 8 failed launches. I'm only talking about launches from "Satish Dhawan Space Centre" and not even considering ISRO and Arianespace collaboration which launched heavy payloads.

"All in all, small launches are a very active market."

ISRO is not just focusing on small launches. It recently tested a Reusable Launch System: RLV-TD. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzxe6q60R70 Of course there is no brouhaha or chest thumping involved as the ISRO team is pretty modest about whatever progress it makes. Hence you won't find this featuring on your Western news channels. This reusable shuttle will be used for sending a manned mission to Moon.

I only referred to small launches because you mentioned them.

If you're interested in Indian rockets with larger payloads, you might be interested in checking out the GLSV Mark III, which is expected to reach production long before the RLV-TD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launc...

I read about both the GSLV Mark III and RLV-TD in Western news sources.

I'm a big fan of India's space program, but it's very tedious getting downvoted on HN for talking about it.

Government employees in India are the blessed lot. They of course have lesser salary but the perks they enjoy more than make up for it. They get free housing for life, pension after retirement, free insurance, they can purchase land at extremely subsidized rates (which for a private employee would be his entire life savings). You just can't compare salaries. Especially in a country like India.

EDIT: Not to mention: If you are a government employee your social life is set. You can easily get married (not easy for a private employee. You have to be in a top MNC and earning a big salary or have a graduate degree from a top-tier university in India). Your entire family is covered by Government insurance for lifetime (which for a private employee ends as soon as his employment terminates). In some cases, your next kith and kin are guaranteed a government job in case you pass away prematurely.

Also, a Government job is the most sought after in India. There is major competition to get a government job (I have even heard of cases where people bribed officials to get the job). Private employees on the other hand demand greater salaries just to be on par with government employees (whose salary + perks are far greater than private employees salary). Apart from that, a Government employee cannot be prematurely terminated (even if s/he is lazy) unless s/he has committed a grave crime.

In that period of 10 years, the government employees had 3 payscale revisions with each revision bringing them almost on par with the average salary of private employees. I don't see that trend stopping anytime soon. 10 years from now, government employee salary will again be almost on par with average salary of private employees.

So whatever you try to say it won't change the fact. Government jobs are stable (You can't be fired as easily. You will be transferred instead), you get freebies that you would never get as a private employee and not to mention post-retirement support from the government. You get subsidized land rates, cheaper home loans through your own co-operative society (for example: google "ISRO Layout" which was formed only for ISRO employees). All those employees got the land at very cheap rates. Today it is prime land worth close to half a million dollars (See: http://www.99acres.com/residential-land-plot-for-sale-in-isr...). When they bought the land, they just had to pay a few thousand dollars. Try buying land in India as a private employee and you'll see your hard earned savings vaporizing in thin air.

What do you mean by subsidizing rockets? Launch costs are to be borne by customer, not Indian government.