DailyDirt: Government Space Programs On Shoestring Budgets
A renewed interest in space technology is growing with re-usable rockets and more private companies getting into the space business. Rocket science is generally a pretty expensive and risky venture because there are just so many things that could go wrong. Still, there are a few space agencies accomplishing significant space missions on relatively small budgets, and we should probably expect amateur space programs to get better and better as the costs to get to space come down.
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- In Ghana, the All Nations University College (ANUC) is developing a fledgling space program with plans to send a cubesat into orbit by 2018. The University of Natural Resources and Energy in Ghana is planning to launch a weather satellite in September 2016, and the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute (GSSTI) has other ambitious plans to send a satellite into space by 2020, too. While Ghana's economy is still mostly dependent on agriculture, these space programs could help farmers and the government plan better and help to preserve the nation's environment. [url]
- Russia is working with countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran on joint space programs for peaceful exploration. Roscosmos (the Russian Federal Space Agency) is helping these countries train their own cosmonauts and build satellites, presumably in exchange for funding that the Russian space agency might need to continue building its own independent space station by 2023. [url]
- India's Mars Orbiter Mission was an impressive success in 2014 -- achieved with a fraction of the budget of other Mars missions. India put an artificial satellite named Mangalyaan in orbit around Mars for just $74 million -- less than the cost to make the fictional movie Gravity (and less than India receives in foreign aid from the UK). The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is only the 4th space agency behind the US, Russia and the EU to have completed a successful Mars space mission, and the entire mission took less than a year to execute from approval to launch. [url]
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