Indian Prime Minister Formally Announces Mars Mission

neo12 writes in with the news that India plans on being the 6th country to launch a mission to mars. "Making the first formal announcement on the country's Mars mission, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said India will send a mission to the Red Planet that will mark a huge step in the area of science and technology. 'Recently, the Cabinet has approved the Mars Orbiter Mission. Under this Mission, our spaceship will go near Mars and collect important scientific information,' he said addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the occasion of the 66th Independence Day."

Comments

Re:Pool ressources

[neither_geek_nor_ner]

This is very interesting. Nobody says this to the US or European countries or Japan or China that you solve all your problems first before going in for scientific advancement. Even the richest of countries have the homeless and the destitute. The US should not go in for the Mars or Voyager or Pioneer missions as there still are some homeless people in New York? NASA's achievements are followed all over the World as the achievement of human-kind. Moreover, India is not a tin-pot dictatorship where things are done on the whims and fancies of the dictator. The middle-class in India is larger than the population of the whole of the US. They should not have any aspirations?

Re:All for $100 million ?

[neither_geek_nor_ner]

India spent $90 million to send a LRO (to the moon) as detailed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1. The US spent $583 million to do the same http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter. Why do you think jobs are being shipped overseas from the US?

Re:All for $100 million ?

[GumphMaster]

Let's see, the United States, paying US rates for labour, managed to build, fly and land the Pathfinder on Mars for about $150 million ('92 dollars) in direct expenditure and spent about the same again running the mission. I think the Indians could conceivably an equivalent mission for less direct expenditure, but that is not a good measure of the peripheral expenditure and effort that would be required to obtain a similar knowledge and infrastructure base to that the US started from.