I am not an expert on their space program or the provenance of rocketry inventions but they seem to have developed both the cryogenic engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE-20) and the boosters in-house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikas_(rocket_engine) - according to the article, the initial design was based on the Viking engine back in the 1970s but haven't they developed it more since then?!). It also seems the payloads are also built in-house. I would be very interested in more details though.
that’s exactly my point. Those engines are incremental improvements on existing designs from the 1970s and 60s - hence why you will find this tech in western museums. There have been improvements - certainly - and the engines are now made almost entirely in India but the original point stands - the designs are not indian hence why we should temper our expectations of where Indian aerospace can go. They currently occupy the niche of cheap space launches and that is based on excellent work by ISRO and their partners.
That's a valid argument but still a bit strange. One could make the same argument about:
- chip design - modern processors are not fundamentally different from 8086, which also belongs in a museum. Sure, there's much higher transistor density and advances like pipelining, branch prediction, multiple cores etc. but fundamentally it's still the same physics and design.
- machine learning - aren't modern deep networks just scaled up versions (with some new architectural components although one can argue that even these were discovered in the 80s and 90s) of old ideas that still use gradient descent and backpropagation. this too sounds like incremental progress.
- commercial aircraft - aren't modern planes just incremental advances of 50-year old planes (the 747 is from the 60s). sure, they are more efficient, use lighter composites etc.
I guess my point is that either (a) technology as a whole has been making incremental progress when viewed from a certain lens, or (b) that while, superficially, a lot of technology still follows designs discovered decades ago, there have been substantial and deep improvements at various lower levels of the "stack".
Maybe a concrete way of looking at this particular issue would be to compare metrics like efficiency of the engines (is amount of thrust * time thrust was produced for / amount of fuel used = change in momentum / amount of fuel used, a useful metric?) or just raw amount of thrust produced? Then one could argue that an engine is essentially still the same as ones from a few decades ago.
Your thrust argument is borne out in the time it takes indian rockets to reach lunar orbit compared to even the USA’s saturn rockets from the 60s - a week in 2022 versus hours in 1970.
I’m not sure your comparison makes sense. The ability to develop chips is what i’m pointing out. That does not exist everywhere and developing that today is a monumental task. This is why chip design is limited to a few countries and fabrication to even fewer ones.
India first wished to purchase its way to space, but due to US embargo it was forced to develop its space program in house. Thus, it's very cheap to launch Indian rockets these days due to lack of imported parts.
In fact Indian rockets use computers fully made in India, and I think none of its software is taken from anywhere.
There were several attempts to derail its space program like mysterious deaths of Homi Baba, Vikram Sarabhai, arrests of Nambi Narayanan and defaming Madhava Nair, but Indian space program like a tortoise has put one foot forward every time.
The limiting factor for ISRO is not design and R&D, but it's the capacity of Indian industry to deliver. I think its rocket development is open source, any Indian industry can take its blueprints and volunteer to supply parts.
How they [ISRO] stir up such a passion amongst their employees is a mystery.
Are there any sources for your claim that "India's critical space technology is not designed or developed in India" as relating to recent missions such as this one?
Just like the US rockets were based on the German V2 designs. You don't see much mention of the US copying Germans whenever the US launches a rocket; and yet here we are.
It was the same with the Chinese around 20 years ago on the internet as well. A significant number of people in the west don’t want India or China to succeed. Asian countries know how to deal with this though- just don’t engage, ignore the opinions of that segment of the western population (in the case of China, literally block them out with the firewall) and keep chugging on. You silence them with results.
Instead of pointing out that many US rocket designs were German ones you launch into a personal attack. There is nothing wrong with borrowing technical work, just that rocketry is complex, needs investment and has a very long path to benefits.
