Space tourism presently not on ISRO radar: Kiran

Udaipur: ISRO chairman and secretary, department of space, A S Kiran Kumar said India is making use of the space technology exceptionally well for developmental initiatives and for improving the living standards of her people.
"Though we are quite capable of doing it, but sending men to Mars for leisure is presently not our priority. We would rather spend our knowledge to provide relief to people in distress than explore the potential in space tourism" Kumar said.The scientist was answering queries of inquisitive school children during an interaction program held here on Tuesday by Shantipeeth, India, a voluntary organization working for peace and fraternity. He elaborated the increasing significance of space research applications in India like disaster management, tele-medicines, bio diversity mapping, forest fire monitoring, weather forecasting, crop yield estimate, water resource management and satellite education.
While answering another question Kumar negated the theory of aliens. "Aliens are purely fictitious and we have not got a single evidence of their presence all these years" he affirmed. Reiterating the organization's commitment for human welfare, the ISRO chief said " Of our various satellites 13 are for communications, 7 for navigations, 14 for remote sensing purposes. Through advance weather forecasting, we are able to disseminate information to thousands of people inhabiting the country's long coastline, " Kumar said.Talking about the recent big achievement of launching 20 satellites in a single flight, the ISRO chief said that 17 co-passenger satellites were of other countries including America, Indonesia, Germany and Canada. " The cost of sending a rocket to launch a small satellite is very huge. We did not do this free of cost, we charged them and thus met our expense for the launching" he informed.