Slashdot Mirror
Why India's Mars Probe Was So Cheap
schwit1 (797399) writes "Alan Boyle has some interesting thoughts on why it cost India so little, less than the budget of the movie Gravity, to build and send its probe Mangalyaan to Mars: 'The $74 million Mars Orbiter Mission, also known by the acronym MOM or the Hindi word Mangalyaan ("Mars-Craft"), didn't just cost less than the $100 million Hollywood blockbuster starring Sandra Bullock. The price tag is a mere one-ninth of the cost of NASA's $671 million Maven mission, which also put its spacecraft into Mars orbit this week. The differential definitely hints at a new paradigm for space exploration — one that's taking hold not only in Bangalore, but around the world. At the same time, it hints at the dramatically different objectives for MOM and Maven, and the dramatically different environments in which those missions took shape.' Read it all. It gives us a hint at the future of space exploration.
Honestly, is there no lever the Indian government won't sink to to save money?
Wouldn't this just hint at risk management? Where you accept a bigger chance of loss. In earlier spacecrafts, this seems harder to justify simply because you are facing so many challenges. So you make everything as perfect as possible because you don't really know which risks my ruin everything you are attempting. And later spacecrafts can get away with just taking care of those vital things and accepting smaller chances of failure as a reasonable risk. And it probably also is so fucking expensive to re-engineer these things that you are fine with launching missions with a higher cost.
Its not easy to compare costs for projects done by different governments. There are different accounting standards for what is "in" and "out" of the project costs. I know nothing about the rules in India, but in Europe, scientific / engineering labor is not included in the "project". I expect the Indian probe was less expensive than a comparable NASA probe, but maybe not by nearly as large a margin as it seems.
This doesn't detract from the mission being a great success for India.
It didn't have a overbearing paralyzing bureaucracy driving the price up.
The article spells out the differences - the India probe took longer, weighed less, has fewer experiments, and probably won't last long. Meanwhile the NASA probe got there quickly, weighs 4 times more, has twice the number of experiments, and can serve as a communication relay for probes on the ground.
I can drive across country in a $5000 car, a $50,000 car, or a $500,000 truck. Each of them have different purposes and will get you there in different ways. To say NASA needs to only use the $5000 car isn't in our long term interest.
It was so cheap because India relied on the R&D done by developed nations. And then it forgot to include the cost of its own R&D for the program. It just included the cost of the mission in an as is where is condition. Vallah!! we have a cheap Mars mission. How else can they score some brownie points? They are certainly not the first to go around Mars. But hey, if they say they are the first at being the cheapest to go to Mars, well that's a first in some way!! And they scored some brownie points.
If you just want to put something around another planet it doesn't cost that much. If you are designing and building equipment that has never flown in space before it costs quite a bit more. And the whole scientific reason for going in the first place is to collect data. And it's not just the number of instruments or what they are measuring but how good are they? Just like benchtop equipment as you want more precision in your equipment prices escalate rapidly.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
comparing interstellar research and exploration to consumer capitalism really is like comparing besan to jackfruit. The goals are entirely different, and the reward as well. Gravity, the film, may have cost more to produce than the Indian mars mission, but its jusified by a seven fold return of $716,392,705 dollars at the box office. wealth is its goal. After a month, the film will go on to blu-ray, netflix, and other less lucrative outlets. After a year it will be nearly forgotten. in 5 years Sandra Bullock will be getting AARP membership notices. in 10 years George Clooney will be well into the average age for a hip replacement surgery.
Mangalyaan's six month mission is about collecting data that will be studied, reviewed, and scrutinized for far longer than the age of a "Gravity" blu-ray. It will continue to pay dividends long after its orbit has decayed. its actions pave the way for discoveries into planetary physics and science, not coffee mugs and concession sales. Mangalyaan's science may one day help solve some of the most complex questions in astrophysics, or it may help start colonies on other planets. Mangalyaan's goal is science, knowledge, and progress toward a bright future.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I see this story as a symptom of a seemingly natural progression in scientific and technical endeavours. The cost of advanced technology in general is being driven down by market forces, so the barrier to entry is lower than it used to be even for space shots. And people are starting to sense economic opportunities in space. So the cost is coming down as the capabilities and sophistication are going up - that's the story of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath.
It may not be long before there will be a viable business model based on salvaging space junk - especially if man-made objects orbiting Earth continue to proliferate.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
And ultimately the cost of anything hinges largely on labor? Even capital equipment which is just built with labor again? Or fuel, extracted with labor? And R&D, labor, labor, labor.
From TFA:
Today, NASA reviews each step of mission development closely, almost "to a fault," Betts said. That kind of attention to detail doesn't come cheap. Nor do American engineers. According to PayScale.com's global survey, aerospace engineers are paid a median annual salary of $9,773 in India, and almost eight times more — $75,940 — in the United States.
How about comparing the CEO pay of the US aerospace companies vs. the Indian ones? Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings.
that's the explanation, period. Juking up the figures make Americans think what they're doing is grander and more important. The Indian space mission was not cheap; it's all the other things that are ridiculously expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe it was so cheap because it doesn't seem to do much, and nothign that hasn't already been done, it is considered a "demo" and study in interplanetary missions.
As a bragging point it seems great for India, I'll try to remember that next time I stay at the Taj West in Bangalore, you know where I can walk a block and see the most crippling poverty that you can imagine.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
TFA pointed out that India is a lot more forgiving of failure and fast iteration than the US is today. There's a lot of truth to that. Our soundbite culture has basically left us where politicians can screech at "that waste of money" like a scientific experiment of dubious value. Even as a staunch fiscal conservative, my response to that sort of thing is... so what? Are you really going to tell me that what's eating the federal budget alive is $2M to study the reproductive habits of spotted-ass field mice as opposed to, say, massive fraud in Social Security Disability, Medicare, government contracting and having a civil service that doubles as a jobs program to artificially inflate the middle class? More often than not, government failure on an engineering effort is the result of the government's byzantine procurement regulations crashing head-long into an unaccountable bureaucracy that doesn't stick to the plan. At least that's the IT side of it. I would imagine that even NASA has a share of that.
"...aerospace engineers are paid a median annual salary of $9,773 in India, and almost eight times more — $75,940 — in the United States."
I would have guessed that $75K figure would be higher.
At many (not software or computer hardware) engineering discussion boards you'll see technical questions coming in that seem to have easy or obvious answers. They are often from overseas engineers or tech people who are unfamiliar with rules of thumb or common methods/processes or have trouble with terminology/English language. It's not because of a lack of competence.
I'll save you the trouble.
India's space program is about subsidizing its fledgling research universities and aerospace industries. Just getting a spacecraft out of earth orbit can be considered a success. India's AstroSat is somewhat of a joke in the west because it was supposed to have launched ten years ago, but here it is today, still in development. But I'm pretty sure India is fine with this situation because it keeps smart people in India thinking about technological problems.
NASA has tons of reviews and process control because they found that this is one way to build in reliability. It has a huge cost, but the price of failure is more than dollars because the US's national (and international) reputation is on the line. Look at what the failure of Beagle 2 did to the UK's space space research efforts. India's space program isn't there yet. They just want to get some iron out there in space, to stake a claim. If they have some failures, and they will, they'll probably accept them at first, then gradually improve their processes. Let's hope they never get to NASA's level of annoying control.
The real reason why it was so cheap is because they did not have to install toilets.
The very end of the article states that hopefully future missions will use solar sails for an even cheaper project price. One tiny, miniscule little rock and there goes the sail. It's like dropping a bowling ball on a parachute. I don't know why people think it's a good idea. It isn't!
It's easy to come in at a much smaller amount when you're not dealing with the rampant corruption in US government contracts. If the Indian government was willing to spend $900 on toilet seats and hammers then the Indian contractors would be screwing their government like our contractors screw us and our tax payers.
Nope no graft in India no sir
Mars needs MOM's. OK, Disney, where's my kickback? :p
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Sounds like the Indian government sat down with a Betamax of the old Andy Griffith show "Salvage 1" and a notepad.
They're comparing the programs merely for the sake of observation rather than advertisement of India's mission. It is interesting to see small space programs approach different goals in development than our home-grown, name brand giant, NASA.
Are you implying that the US Government overpays, spending money and managing projects in a wasteful or inefficient manner? I say good day to you sir!
Whatever the cost, it just got over a billion people excited about space again.
They outsourced it to Bangladesh ;-)
> Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings.
Yeah, let's look at that! In just the last three months, Apple CEO Tim Cook was paid $10 million dollars. Over those three months, Apple customers bought just over $40 billion of Apple products. So one of every 4,000 dollars you spend on Apple products goes to the CEO. If the CEO wasn't paid at all, an iPad would be ten cents cheaper! Enslave CEOs, so we can save a dime!
If the US spent six times as much in order to reduce the risk of failure, that would be STUPID.
It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
NASA tried the "faster, better, cheaper" (FBC) approach in the 90's with roughly a 50% success rate. UK also tried a "cheap" Mars lander, the Beagle, that was a bust.
If India can demonstrate they can KEEP going cheap and be successful, then we can conclude they are on to something. NASA's FBC also looked good at the start.
It's too early to tell for India. And even if they could get up to a 70% success rate, the 30% failure rate could be seen as a national embarrassment by some standards. Although, maybe a 3rd-world country may be more tolerable of such, being seen as underdog newbies.
It's also hard to plan science and control staffing if 30% of your probes are duds; and by sheer probability, 2 or 3 could fail in a row even at a 70% average, leaving a decade of gaps.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, I'd imagine the cost difference is because we have engineers/developers/etc who make about 10-20 times the amount of their Indian counterparts. Yes, NASA pays exhorbinant costs (take a look at how much private companies are paying for their shuttles vs NASA) . You also have to compare American cost of labor/parts vs India. Now can someone run the metrics of cost of services/goods of India vs America? Take that factor into account and give us an adjusted price difference
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Check out the cheap ride in the "dog seat". Good spots reserved for family members.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's disturbing all these comparisons between the budget of Hollywood movies and a space program. It's ridiculous... the space program may aim to eventually travel to the stars, but Hollywood movies are MADE FROM stars. Imagine if space programs had to build orbiters and probes out of actual stars... now you get the picture. The precious resource that Hollywood movies are made from far outshines any glorified firework.
To look at it yet another way, Gravity took US ALL into space, in a way that probably felt more real to us than if we had actually gone into boring old space. Whereas the Indian mars orbiter didn't take anyone, not even Matt Daemon. It might send back a few snapshots and data hardly anyone will be interested in. We won't even get a T-Shirt out of it. There is no comparison.
Yea, but if they spent 6 times as much for 6 times the functionality and/or lifetime, that wouldn't be so stupid, right?
I didn't really see in "thoughts" in the article. He only pointed out that "things" are cheaper in India (materials and people). I don't see anything thought provoking about that, except how I'm going to keep my job from going there.
Maybe they can outsource their work to India's space agency for $10/hour.
Do you have ESP?
The point is, even if they made NO money, you'd save an entire ten cents on that new iPad. Cut their pay in half, you'll save a nickel on your iPad.
Therefore, the idea that the cost of US goods is drastically affected by CEO salary, or that "Inflated CEO's salaries are parasitic on US company earnings" is ridiculous beyond measure. You're talking about 1% of 1% of the sales price and revenue. It's like saying products are inexpensive because of the cost of printing UPC codes.
> more in a year than the rest of us earn in a lifetime?
Median CEO salary in the US is $740K. If you work from age 18 to age 62, that's 44 years. At just $50K/year, that's $2.2 million- three times what the average CEO makes. If in fact you plan to make less in your life than a typical CEO makes in a year, you might consider completing school. Or showing up sober.
> so whatever made the first probe fail might also make the second fail if they share design features or code.
Yes, if you make two copies of the same probe, two copies of the same failure is likely. However, that would only cost maybe 10%-20% more than making one copy.
I'm talking about do what India did - design and build a system, more or less from the ground up - twice.
Have two companies do it independently, each at 1/6th the cost of the "reliable" version. The two different probes are unlikely to fail in the same way.
Even if they did both fail, you could fix the problem and build two more, while spending less than the 6X reliable approach.
Aside from the main point (why the Indian project was cheaper), this article repeats an important error that we've also seen in discussions of US space projects for decades: failing to include the delivery cost to outer space in the headline cost number. It's misleading to give the cost of building the Space Station if it's just sitting on Earth. Oh, you want the Space Station in space?! Well, that will cost extra.
This matters because it massively underestimates the cost to US taxpayers of NASA projects. For example, NASA always refused to concede that launch costs were part of the Space Station program. To be clear, these were extra launches dedicated to launching pieces of the Space Station.
The failure to count launch costs as part of the headline tally also reduced for many years the attention to one of the most important barriers to the US space program -- reducing the cost of putting a kilo of anything into low earth orbit. That is changing, but it took too long.
Maybe the business model India used is worthy of attention.
I'm considering a Kick Starter project of sending a vehicle to the Moon to harvest He3. I will use technologies from anyone I chose. I will then sell my bounty to highest bidder. What could possibly go wrong?
I've gotten to Duna in Kerbal Space Program, a manned mission, and spent only $27 on the program.
Now, respect my authoritay!
She would have reminded them that they have no place in sending up a space probe when they still have poverty amongst their population. She also would have told them that it was a pointless waste of money since it had already been done before. In short, India would be best advised to consult with my mother-in-law before they deign to advance scientifically.
Silly cow.
If they earn 200 USD/month, a mars mission will be less as well.
If the government pays a government worker $100k, that is an $100k increase in GDP? Are you sure? Because I thought the government pays their workers from taxes, which have already been counted in the GDP value.
As a person born/brought up/lived in India, I was frustrated about bribery in every corner. While India seems to be the most "religious minded" country, it is one of the hypocrite societies (same as other arab-religious nations, and its neighbours to NEWS:China, Bangla,Pak,Afg,SL, etc ).
Every-time I had to go for a visit, I 'm stressed thinking about bribery-situations (you can be doing a perfectly lawful activity but yet may get harassed by police to extract bribe). I even had to cheat the cons, by giving Canadian-Tire money. God forgive me for cheating the cons please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money
- Prem
dirt cheap developers!
MOM studies the content of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Existence of methane indicates the existence of life on Mars.