My ticket to moon just got cancelled

Having my breakfast, as I watch the headlines "Chandrayaan-1 develops critical malfunction", my mind shifts to a scene 8 months before - "Chandrayaan launched". I still remember reading news articles which said that people would soon start (or had already started) buying and selling land on moon, predicting that the prices would appreciate, so that when man eventually landed there one day to begin his life, they would become billionaires. Very soon, I also read an article "when the bubble burst", about the burst of the investment banks and insolvency of Lehman Brothers. I couldn’t stop correlating the two, both being cases of man’s greed, cases of trading practically intangible assets. It is in this context that I become dumbstruck in total awe of human mind’s imagination – to make a ‘surreal’ concept look ‘so real’, and when the bubble bursts, sit in utter dismay wondering how it really happened.

USD 80 MIO is the expected budget of Chandrayaan project. A report says almost 50% of Indians are below poverty line. I am a 'much above average citizen' of the country and the news of Chandrayaan has made no impact on me. I wonder what impact this expenditure would make to the majority of the Indians. May be in the long run it would, but I guess at least for the present it would be more prudent to have more of government expenditure for the people and collaborate with other countries than compete with them in sending rockets - ‘Indian made rockets’ - to space which eventually fail (fall). I don’t have fingers in my hand to count the number of failed ISRO ventures – most of them, may be all of them have been re-inventing the wheel type, rather than path breaking. In a country like ours where millions are starving in abject poverty, resource allocation should be more meaningful.

But alas! This place called Earth is crazy, so are the earthlings – the only reason I see to conduct these experiments, so that people tired of this planet and its inhabitants can flee to Mars or Moon or wherever life is deemed possible. But again, will those people tired of Earth get the chance, when it eventually comes?