> Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?

Your argument is all over the place. This thread is about if India could tackle LEO comsats, but perhaps you're seeing it through a lens of prestige/success.

> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene

You'll love Gil Scott-Heron's classic that wrestled the same ideas in the 1960s USA, titled Whitey on the Moon