On India's Space Program

Unfortunately, our space program is misplaced priority. All these scientists and engineers working on Chandrayan etc should have been put to work in setting up a proper ballistic missile delivery system for our nukes - where we badly lag both Pakistan and China.

Our only spece ventures should be military satellite systems and spy satellites.

Currently we dont have a credible nuclear delivery option, making us very vulnerable to conventional attack with threat of nuclear war. Most of our missiles are 2 decade old technology which doesnt even work properly.

People just dont know what they are doing in our govt funded space program. We can make more money by exporting Hero Honda motorcycles, which are of excellent quality viv-a-vis Chinese, than by trying to monetise our space program which is basically capital destruction with no viable return.

Please remember that most of out IIT graduates do not join our space program or even BARC - they mostly sell biscuits or insurance - because the money is there. Our space and atomic programs run totally on second rung colleges and physics students from whom the best are picked up with superhuman efforts from the HR departments sifting 2-3000 graduates to select one capable person. The people (engineers) who enter pvt sector here are all overqualified and capable - they are attracted with big salaries because pvt people dont want to interview 1000 people to find 1 gem. But BARC is forced to do this. oOr brightest minds wrestle with selling biscuits and buying up overpriced real estate.

If I was running the country, I would ban our IIT engineers from leaving the country or working in unrelated fields. And I would put security needs over boasting rights - which is all our space program is about.

Our Prithvi, Agni basically dont work well. Pakistan has much smaller solid fuel propelled missiles capable of hitting anywhere in India. We do not have the specialised hardened silos needed for surviving a nuclear attack on our missile sites and lauch second - survivability is just not there.

Currently our nuclear deterrent is based only on attack planes and disassembled airplane bombs - we do not have good designs for missile launched nukes.