Then There Were 4

It looks as if India is about to join the very exclusive club of nations that can independently support manned space operations. According to a space.com story found here the Indian Space Research Agency IRSO (?) has decided to get ambitious and propose a manned space program costing $3 Billion a year which is more than 3 times its annual budget at present. Good luck to them. I hope things go well and that a bit more cooperation between the space going countries can be achieved.

If only governments over here could be just a little more abitious, I note that looking at the wikipedia article on GDP that the richest "country" in the world is the EU with 18 times as much GDP as India. Of course there are many complications here that means you can't take a simplistic GDP view of things but you would still think that the europeans together could make a go at an independent manned space program. Its not like a space program is a total waste of money, all of the money is spent on Earth and invested in real economies. Anyway I suppose we should be pleased for the ambitious ground based programs we have here, CERN, ITER, ESO etc.