One of the bits of news which has puzzled me the most this week, although I have been slightly wary of writing anything about it for fear of saying anything out of line, was the news that India has now landed a spacecraft on the moon. Of course I think it’s wonderful that humanity as a whole is exploring space; any country surely has a right to have interstellar aspirations. Yet, not that I want to tell any country how to run itself, or think that we in the ‘developed west’ have a right to dictate to those in the ‘undeveloped east’, but I must say that countries like India have huge infrastructure and poverty issues which surely need sorting out before they spend billions of pounds/dollars/rupees launching anything into space.

When John and I visited India five years ago, I remember seeing gigantic undeveloped, dirty, poverty-stricken areas crying out for investment: people were living as they had done a century ago, in dilapidated housing, walking along unpaved roads. Yet between such areas, there were pockets of sleek, modern buildings: they were the areas which the Indian government obviously wanted us to see. To be honest it struck me as quite perverse that any government could spend so much developing such small places while leaving the rest of the country and millions of people to rot. This space program is obviously a vile continuation of that attitude: the Indian government want the country to look like a modern superpower so they start firing probes at the moon, hoping nobody notices the huge social and infrastructure problems which surely should have been it’s priority.