Indian manned spaceflight

[MartG]

Head of the Indian space organisation ISRO has announced their intention to launch a manned flight in 2021

https://phys.org/news/2019-01-india-space-mission-...

Interestingly, though they only have a fraction of the budget NASA have spent on SLS, this flight would beat NASA's Orion planned manned flight into space by a year

[MartG]

55palfers said:

I think a lot of Indians would rather see the $1.4 billion spent on the relief of some of the grinding poverty in New Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, etc.

You do realise the money isn't just catapulted into space, never to be seen again ?

It is all spent here on Earth - probably most of it within India, supporting various industries employing thousands of people. In the case of the US it has been shown that money spent on spaceflight had a positive return on investment way out of proportion to the amount spent, and I suspect the same will be true of India.