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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.
Honestly, is there no lever the Indian government won't sink to to save money?
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.
Faster, Cheaper, Better.
Pick any two....
You meant India started the Mars probe program all the way back when they just got independence from the UK?
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.
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.
Faster, Cheaper, Better, Contractors
Pick any two....
(Contractors count as 2)
hahahhahahaha.. Oh man. You are hilarious.
Anyone who thinks American bureaucracy is over bearing and paralyzing clearly hasn't dealt with other government.
My experience with the India's bureaucracy was that it is the worst. Sudden fees(Bribes*) , being shuffled to other family members fr more sudden fees*. It's realy bad.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/102276...
I have good news for you** the American Bureaucracy is pretty damn efficient and honest.
*really bribes as in, it's going into this guys pocket.
**sadly, like most Americans these, you won't like facts and just ignore this good news it it's counter to you belief.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
Really, the US police only investigates crimes if reported by wealthy people!? I don't know what kind of parallel universe you live in.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
"...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.
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.
Nope no graft in India no sir
India is well known for its lack of corruption.
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.
Maybe it was so cheap because it doesn't seem to do much
Although I do not share your view on this mission and on why its payload is limited, I believe you correctly identified the trick to limit costs: Keep and simple.
Management costs are not linear with mission complexity. As the payload and complexity increase, so does the risk of something going wrong, leading to increased costs in planing and designing the whole thing. Because the costs are higher, the pressure for success increases and the need to cross-check every detail arises, implicating even more costs. You fall in a upward spiral for costs. Interfacing/integration costs are of course also higher with more complex mission, but they are not as non-linear as management costs.
In keeping a mission simple, you may limit the management cost explosion. In a sense it is sad because it means you are so cheap, no one cares if you fail (other than you). As soon as the financial sources start to care, you get into NASA/ESA budget regions. So maybe it is the best way to proceed, making multiple smaller mission.
The Canadian ACE/SCISAT mission also achieved something similar. Its a very simple science satellite, with only two instruments. The costs were ridiculous and the time from planing to launch was extreme short. Considering it flew totally new and revolutionary instrument designs, I find that quite amazing. The mission as now significantly outlived its initial planning and is one of the most successful scientific earth observing mission. So much for those who think it has something to do with the costs of engineering in India. I doubt the Canadians engineers are much cheaper than the American ones. The key to success was to keep and small.
> Faster, Cheaper, Better.
> Pick any two....
F35.
Your argument is invalid.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
> Faster, Cheaper, Better.
> Pick any two....
F35.
Your argument is invalid.
Cheaper than an F22, faster than a Cessna.
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.
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.
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.
When big pharma patents a drug and makes it so expensive people die, or they push a drug that is useless and even dangerous.
When Monsanto controls a significant portion of how food is produced.
When you cannot look to a local provider for nearly anything (internet, clothes, etc), because either they cannot compete or their prices are too high for everyman.
When laws are passed that curtail your freedoms in exchange for better profits to the few.
It does infect your everyday life, and I would argue that your have even less power to confront it as you would a direct bribe.
Silence is a state of mime.
At this rate, it won't be cheaper than the F22.
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.
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.
As a general rule I agree that the US Bureaucracy is surprisingly honest. In my experience most corruption in US projects doesn’t come from the bureaucracy but from congress. US government procurement rules are designed to pay off the various political power blocks associated with darned near every person in congress. The rank and file government employees know it is corrupt but they have to follow the law as written. For some items these rules very likely double the cost.
What could possibly go wrong?
For starters: there is no noticeable demand for He3 on earth right now.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.