DELHI — Let’s send a mission to Mars, Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh announced a couple of weeks ago, just as his government
was fending off corruption charges and the country was still
recovering from the biggest blackout since the invention of
electricity. Although Singh’s $77 million plan did nothing to
divert attention from his administration’s failings, it did
focus some unfortunate attention on India’s space program,
suggesting that what had been a fine endeavor to date has now
been hitched to India’s dream of becoming a great power. Since
its creation in the 1960s, the program has had a reasonably
successful record of placing communications, earth-mapping and
meteorological satellites [pdf] in orbit around the Earth. For
all the carping about such missions’ cost, especially given the
poverty in India, they seem to have paid for themselves. But the
ambition of a Mars mission goes well beyond practical
applications. It’s about basic science research and planetary
exploration, as well as a very real, and l