Talk about outsourcing! Will they export their lowly hygiene into space as well? Will future space travelers have to dodge waves of high-speed Indian turds and relatives' corpses (jettisoned from their craft for religious purposes) in addition to asteroids?
ISRO to launch India's first spacecraft to Marshttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/india-mars-probe-launch-space"The cyclone season is almost over, the planets are in alignment, the countdown has started. On Tuesday at 2.46pm local time, a rocket will blast off from the Indian space port on a small island in the Bay of Bengal, heading for Mars.
Its course will be closely followed. The $70m (£45m) mission – India's first attempt to reach the red planet – aims not just to gather information that might indicate if life has ever existed or could exist there, nor simply to showcase Indian technology, but to steal an interplanetary march on its regional rival, China.
'In the last century the space race meant the US against the Soviets. In the 21st century it means India against China,' said Pallava Bagla, one of India's best known science commentators. 'There is a lot of national pride involved in this.'
That the mission was about national pride was never in doubt. It was announced last year by prime minister Manmohan Singh in his annual address from the battlements of Delhi's famous Red Fort, the bastion of the Mughal emperors. Its success would mean the Indians would join the Russians, the US and the European space agency which have all also reached Mars."
