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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.
Faster, Cheaper, Better.
Pick any two....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
Oh, India's government totally has a large (and corrupt) bureaucracy: As usual, basic information courtesy of Wikipedia.
Say what you want about the US(and there's plenty to say), you won't be paying "facilitation fees" to report a crime in the US, and none of our national elected officials are currently under any serious suspicion of murder.
Now, I'm not sure what exactly this means about the interaction between space research and cost, but the "lack of bureaucracy" is a bit out of touch with the reality in India.
I'd lean towards:
A. Everything being more expensive in the US. That's the first world for you. Everyone involved here wants a decent standard of living.
B. We have a hugely entrenched corporate aerospace industry, that has their hooks in every space project.
Could be something else too, the world's complicated, but "bureaucracy" is a bumper-sticker explanation that doesn't accurately describe differences between the US and India.
That is because in the US, it is the upper crust who are allowed to bribe. Regular everyday bureaucrats and gov. officials are fired/prosecuted for bribing. However once you climb above the bottom tier or two you find a good old boys network full of corporate campaign donations, lobbyist dinners, regulatory capture, backroom deals, etc. The corruption is there, but the public is blinded to it, because at least the police busted that person expediting taxi licenses for coke, and the clerk that was deleting parking tickets for half price. Oh and football!
Silence is a state of mime.
The difference between India and the USA is that in the USA you bribe an official to look the other way while in India you have to bribe an official just to get them to do the damn job you were already paying them to do in the first place.
Whatever the cost, it just got over a billion people excited about space again.
Say what you want about the US(and there's plenty to say)
And you call this covering up US corruption? Look, bro, I know you need the US government to be evil and the worst thing ever, for whatever political beliefs you've got there, but frankly, most of the world is doing worse. We have a lot of really reliable and good institutions to help deal with corruption. We have plenty of problems too, but we're simply not under the evil tyranny your overextended teenage rebellion needs.
The fact that a lot of what you're saying here is also objectively wrong(Seriously Clinton "killing" stevens?) is kinda secondary to the fact that you're brewing up an image that's unhealthily paranoid in general.
I'm not sure what connotation you are implying, but this is a good thing.
That the general public and general worker is not accustomed to bribery is a good thing.
Yes, it would be better if the upper crust didn't bribe as well. But understand that bribery for the average person is horrible.
Being pulled over by police looking for a bribe. ...
Getting your passport takes a bribe.
Teachers take bribes for grades.
Those are issues that would affect and ruin most interactions of most regular people. Thank god, us regular people are 'not allowed' to bribe. Most of us who grew up in countries like that know what kind of environment it is.
Let's face it if it is a choice between BIGCORPA and BIGCORPB getting a big government contract and there is bribery involved, it doesn't affect the average person on a day to day level. Yes, it is wrong. Yes, it should be fixed. But you cannot compare this high level corruption to the day to day corruption that infects your daily life.
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.
It would make much more sense to send two cheap probes and have one fail. That would be one third the cost.
It would cost less than that, since much of the cost is NRE. But if the chance of failure is, say, 10%, that does NOT mean that the chance of both failing is only 1%. Failures are not random independent events. Failures are often the result of design or programming flaws, so whatever made the first probe fail might also make the second fail if they share design features or code.