>>13257854>putting china ahead of indiaha
China hasn't built anything new, their entire space program consists of 'salyut with chinese characteristics'. Nearly everything they use was bought or licensed from decades-old Soviet designs.
India, disgusting street shitters they may be, are at least building all their stuff from scratch. The Indian space program is genuinely impressive when you consider the fact they have little experience in rocketry and a shoestring budget that would barely fund an executive liquid lunch at Boeing on a typical Wednesday afternoon.
India's space program is currently extremely basic and is definitely behind that of China, but by doing all of these basic fundamental steps themselves at the beginning (developing and building their own launch systems, capsules, suits, pretty much everything) they're going to gradually build up that cultural and institutional knowledge that will, once the momentum gets going, turn into something genuinely strong and innovative in the future.
China buys all their knowledge and thus misses out on important tidbits of knowledge and institutional heritage that can only ever be gained by building things yourself. I
t's like comparing two people playing a videogame but one of them uses cheatcodes. The cheater is going to finish the game in singleplayer easily but they never really put in the effort to learn how it works mechanically, so when they go and play multiplayer without their cheats they get btfo'd. India hasn't finished the game yet but they're learning the mechanics and getting better everyday.
