...but I'm not convinced that's the way it is actually playing out on the ground.

When I was living in India, I hung out with a number of folks from the ISRO, including the son of its founder, and frequently queried them on their country's ambitions in space. Their answers were universally modest: to reap the technological and civil and military benifits of building a home-grown communications and remote observation capability. I asked them specifically about human spaceflight, and they always replied that it would be too expensive and impractical; I asked them specifically about the challenge posed by China, and their response was more or less that it just wasn't realistic to think about competing with the Chinese. (India fought an extremely short and embarrasing war with China in '62, and China is something they've been mostly loath to think about ever since).

Here's my take on the situation, which is admittedly more speculative when it comes to the Chinese side of things (with which I have no first-hand experience):

China's aspirations in space have nothing to do with merely proving themselves, or showing up India or the West or anyone else. What most western observers fail to understand is that China is not some young, backwater, upstart of a country. Rather, they are the world's oldest and historically most powerful civilization, and they know it. "China" means "all under heaven," and if an old emperor once ignored that madate and burned Wen Ho's fleet, they've now learned from that mistake, and won't repeat it again. China's current government may operate in terms of 5-year plans, but China's actual civilization can think in much longer terms: where do we want to be 100 years from now? Where do we want to be 1,000 years from now? 1,000 years is not such a long time, if you're talking about the collective subconscious of China. And if you're thinking or dreaming on those kind of timescales, the human expansion into space is simply a no-brainer.

India, in contrast, has no cohesive or linear history to draw upon. Prior to the unification imposed by the British, India consisted of over 500 principalities in a more or less constant state of strife. Now India is an empire, but they haven't quite realized it. The disparate ties of religion, caste, tribe, village, region, language, et cetera are far more important to the average Indian than the common tie of being part of one nation. What national conscious does exist is very young -- and eager, yes, but focused on short timeframes and immediate practicalities.



So, although China and India are very similar on the surface -- as vast and increasingly technologically powerful empires -- beneath that surface there isn't much basis for comparison. India will be quite happy to send people into space when there is an immediate and obviously practical benifit in doing so -- ie, when the infrastructure of human spaceflight is well-developed and its economics are running in the black -- but they will not do so on account of a thousand-year dream. The Chinese will.

Cheers,

Nathan. (Who is seriously betting that the Chinese will be performing a manned lunar flyby during the Beijing Olympics in 2008).