The Indian Space Research Organi­za­tion has been doing a number of cool things lately, the most recent achieve­ment being the successful launch of India’s Chandrayaan-1. As a frequent reader of Slashdot, there are primarily three kinds of comments that I’ve come to expect each time a major announce­ment is made regarding India’s space program.

The first category contains jokes, often related to call-centers. These can be safely ignored. The second category includes comments congrat­u­lating human-kind for its achieve­ment. While overly repet­i­tive and probably unnec­es­sary, such comments can be easily tolerated.

Finally, there is always a bunch of people whose argument goes like this:

Why is India wasting money on space research when there are millions afflicted by poverty?

This line of reasoning is flawed for a variety of reasons. Here’s why:

1. The argument assumes that there is no (or very little) benefit accrued by spending money on the space program. Further, it assumes that money not spent on the space program would be used to fight poverty, whatever that means.
2. Poverty is not caused by a shortage of resources. There are individ­uals who are very rich, and yet there are commu­ni­ties that are facing starva­tion. If the solution were as simple as taking wealth from the rich and giving it to the poor, all the socialist countries would be models of good governance.
3. Wealth is not something that moves from one individual to another; it is created. As a silly metaphor, think of it as a flame that keeps you warm: you need to keep adding fuel if you want it to last.
4. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Charity as a way of life is detri­mental to the progress of society.
5. We can’t wait to solve the problem of poverty before moving on to the Next Big Thing. That way lies madness.

According to this press release by ISRO, India’s Chandrayaan-1 space­craft success­fully hit the Moon as planned on November 14^th 2008. An excerpt:

In a historic event, the Indian space programme achieved a unique feat today (November 14, 2008) with the placing of Indian tricolour on the Moon’s surface on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday. The Indian flag was painted on the sides of Moon Impact Probe (MIP), one of the 11 payloads of Chandrayaan-1 space­craft, that success­fully hit the lunar surface today at 20:31 hrs (8:31 pm) IST. This is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon. The point of MIP’s impact was near the Moon’s South Polar Region. It may be recalled that the modern Indian space programme was initi­ated in 1962 when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India.