India is set to launch a Mars orbiter into space tomorrow; the mission was announced only months after China's attempt reach Mars failed. Is there a space race going on in Asia?
"There is an ongoing race for space-related power and prestige currently in Asia, although few officials will admit it," James Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told Bloomberg Businessweek. "India is clearly concerned about China's recent rise in space prestige and wants to minimize that damage."
The launch is scheduled to blast off on its 140-million-mile journey at 2:38 p.m Nov. 5. The craft, called Mangalyaan (the Mars Orbiter Mission probe), will reach the red planet in about a year, the Washington Post reported.
The mission has been highly criticized because many believe India cannot afford such a large endeavor at this time. The country will pay 4.5 billion-rupee ($73 million) for the mission, but many Indians live on less than the equivalent of $2 a day, Businessweek reported.
"Questions are sometimes asked about whether a poor country like India can afford a space program and whether the funds spent on space exploration, albeit modest, could be better utilized elsewhere," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who served on the country's Space Commission in the 1970s, said in a speech, Businessweek reported. "This misses the point that a nation's state of development is finally a product of its technological prowess."
The Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said rumors of a space race were false. He said the organization hoped the research would cause a "trickle-down" effect that would benefit the Indian economy.
"It's a national milestone for the country to conquer territories beyond planet Earth," Bharath Gopalaswamy, a Chennai native who is the deputy director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Post. "India has its own ambitions. Just because we're poor doesn't mean we shouldn't have any ambitions. That's not the way we think about ourselves, right?"
The mission plans to look for atmospheric methane on Mars, it will also map the planet's surface.
