Canadian Space Agency (CSA) budget vs India (ISRO)
A couple of days ago the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G. Madhavan Nair gave a talk at Caltech. What I found interesting is the size of the Indian space budget. ISRO budget is approaching a billion U.S. dollars a year and they employ 16,000 people. Compare that with the Canadian Space Agency with it's budget of $300 million Canadian. And the prospect of a larger CSA budget seems remote. As well while Canada has an astronaut core it has no means to get its astronauts into space other than through partners like NASA, while India is gearing up for manned launches. I'm not advocating Canada develop its own launching capability but I do wonder where does this put Canada's future in space? Your thoughts?
Isn't there some Canadian
Isn't there some Canadian astronauts going up into space sometime soon? I seem to recall reading that somewhere. I don't really know what an agency can do with $300 million. There's a certain portion of that that will go to administrative and ancillary costs no doubt. I can't imagine that would leave a lot left for many satellites. From what your saying, I'm left with the impression that Canada isn't really putting much stock in space and could not develop their own launching capabilities (for human rated at least, maybe for non-human rated) if they wanted to.
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Jonathan Sharma