Posted by sohkamyung 4 days ago
- Low GDP per-capita, offset by immense scale, which means the central government can mobilize massive resources for national projects, but municipal bodies are financially starved (municipal revenues in India are < 1% of total tax collections, for context it's 6% in South Africa and 10% in Brazil). Cities are completely dependent on the state for money, unlike countries where cities control their own property and commercial taxes, so they raise very little on their own, and states have multiple other priorities so cities never get as much money as they need.
- Leading off the previous point - executive power over cities is very fragmented, most authority rests with state chief ministers and state-appointed bureaucrats rather than empowered local mayors, so city planning is subordinate to state-level political priorities. City management itself is divided among uncoordinated state-level bodies (separate agencies for roads, water, power, and transit). There's a lot of accountability voids where something goes wrong and everybody thinks it's a different body's responsibility. The poor coordination also means you'll have things like a road laid on Monday, and on Wednesday the water authority digs it up to fix pipes underneath.
- The Indian constitution guarantees freedom to move and reside anywhere, so it's not legally possible to control rural to urban migration like China did with its Hukou system. E.g. Bangalore adds anywhere from 350k to 600k people a year almost entirely from internal migration. Much faster than housing, transit, and civic utilities can keep up with.
Things are getting better, although slowly and unevenly:
- Mass transit is expanding rapidly
- Door-to-door solid waste collection now reaches roughly 98% of urban wards (tougher than you would think because the unrestricted migration tends to create a lot of ad-hoc unplanned settlements on the outer parts of cities)
- The central government is working on allowing cities to issue municipal bonds to raise their own funds.
- Bangalore now (as of last year) has a single body called the Greater Bangalore Authority that has statutory oversight over previously uncoordinated agencies that handle water, transport, power, transit etc. Other state governments with major cities are watching to see how it plays out, and will likely copy + adapt it to their own major cities based on how it goes.
As for the rest of India, you can largely find the root causes of problems by tracing adverse selection effects among the elites that do remain, massive, conflicting vested interests and decades of horrible, incompetent policymaking.
There's also the issue that a solid booster must be "fueled" before it reaches the pad, meaning you have ground crew working around a large quantity of explosive material. A Brazilian solid rocket exploded on the launch pad, killing 21 people.[1] Liquid rockets can be made inert until everyone is far away, then loaded with propellant.
A big advantage of solid rockets is that they can be stored for long periods and quickly launched. This is handy for use cases like ICBMs, but not particularly important for commercial launches.
Obviously solid rockets can't be relit.
Could that be the use of the 4th stage?
Above is the basic semantics, and it can be further optimized, such as by extending battery power for the second stage to use it for circularization, inserting a single purpose satellite-like pusher device above the responsibility boundary at the top of second stage and payload satellite and calling it the third stage, or just adding actual third stage above second stage, etc.
Adding more and more stages improve performance per Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, but it'll add risk factors and also obviously add more dead weights in electronics and engines and support equipment, so 2-3 stages is usually the good balance between performance and risk/costs. You can have as many stages as you want if you think you can handle it.
I think that only applies to liquid fueled rockets. At a minimum the Scout family of rockets (USA) and the Lambda 4s (Japan) both use 4 stages. That is what I was trying to say above. The sibling comment also points out that you at least need a third stage to circularize the orbit, since you can't re-light solid rocket motors. I'm not exactly clear on why its 4 and not 3, but that seems to be the standard with solid fueled rockets.
(ISAS side of Japanese space programs is chock full of political BS, everything from the pencil rocket that continued on from IJN rocket researches to the "unguided" L-4S to the LUNAR-A probe with diameter of approximately 152-155mm to one-man laptop launchable Epsilon LV concept focusing on "civilian low-cost rapid launch demands")
That makes there be a mathematically optimal number.
It can be hard when you are blindsided by negativity that seems to come out of nowhere. Hopefully this is helpful to us all https://rss.com/podcasts/the-narrative-networks-podcast/3017...