Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Sent a Rocket To Mars For Less Than It Cost To Make 'The Martian' (backchannel.com)
Ipsita Agarwal via Backchannel retells the story of how India's underfunded space organization, ISRO, managed to send a rocket to Mars for less than it cost to make the movie "The Martian," starring Matt Damon as Mark Watney. "While NASA's Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million," Agarwal writes. In what appears to be India's version of "Hidden Figures" (a movie that also cost more to make than ISRO's budget for the Mars rocket), the team of scientists behind the rocket launch consisted of Indian women, who not only managed to pull off the mission successfully but did so in only 18 months. Backchannel reports: A few months and several million kilometers later, the orbiter prepared to enter Mars' gravity. This was a critical moment. If the orbiter entered Mars' gravity at the wrong angle, off by so much as one degree, it would either crash onto the surface of Mars or fly right past it, lost in the emptiness of space. Back on Earth, its team of scientists and engineers waited for a signal from the orbiter. Mission designer Ritu Karidhal had worked 48 hours straight, fueled by anticipation. As a child, Minal Rohit had watched space missions on TV. Now, Minal waited for news on the orbiter she and her colleague, Moumita Dutta, had helped engineer. When the signal finally arrived, the mission control room broke into cheers. If you work in such a room, deputy operations director, Nandini Harinath, says, "you no longer need to watch a thriller movie to feel the thrill in life. You feel it in your day-to-day work." This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space. User shas3 notes in a comment on Hacker News' post: "If you are interested in Indian women scientists and engineers, there is a nice compilation (a bit tiresome to read, but worth it, IMO) of biographical essays called 'Lilvati's Daughters.'"
Just once can we let a girl do something without showering her with praises for doing it with a vagina? How about praising them for a remarkable scientific achievement? Or for sticking to a tight budget? Or for helping mankind? Or for their dedication. Every time I did something if someone brought up the fact that I also have testicles I would quickly get the idea they think testicles hold a person back. Cut this shit out. We'll never, ever move on until people like whoever wrote the summary stop holding us back.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Nice job
Please delete this and create another post in the future when people are running around Mars for less than it costs to make 'The Martian'
Nobody sensible would consider that a meaningful comparison either.
Second the Martian made a profit, and the mars mission hasn't. So the Mars mission actually had a much higher net cost.
The symbol of Equality and Justice is the empty scale. We get this from Socrates defining Justice and Equality. When a person or group puts bias or favoritism on the scale, the arms move. The natural response is to add favoritism or bias to counter the first. However, no to people, groups, issues, circumstances, or conclusions are the same. It is impossible to get back to equality while something exists on the scale. Now when you look at society, you can have a scale with countless pans for every person and group. The more people attempt to add and remove bias, the more difficult balance becomes and the harder it is to return to justice and equality.
The only way to obtain equality is to remove all bias and all favoritism.
Anyone with training and education in Philosophy, especially at higher levels should know and understand the lesson. Yet we have countless "leaders" pushing for identities nearly everywhere.
No, I don't think it's accidental. Yes, I think people who understand this can push back and promote a better society.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
A casino in Brazil was constructed and opened for business for less money that it took Hollywood to produce "Ocean's Twelve", costarring Matt Damon. Brazilians were jubiliant afterwards.
Really. Not a snark, not a joke, I mean it. Its really fantastic that they managed a Mars mission on an extremely tight budget. Its a really difficult project and they did a fantastic job.
This sort of ultra-cheap approach might allow lots of probes to be sent to less studied bodies.
Says more about what the editors are obsessing over than anything else.
You know how there are always complaints in these comments sections about how stories are not "tech" enough? Well, here's a story about a fucking rocket to Mars, and this is what's showing up in the comments section.
I've just realized that it's not the Slashdot editors or the stories they select that don't have enough tech in them, it's many of the commenters.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The $651 million for Maven includes all the support costs for the mission. The salaries of the controllers, paying their share of time on the Deep Space Network, etc... Does the $74 million include the same thing? If not, then it's a comparison between Apples and Baseballs.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Slashdot seems to have a quota of one grrrl power story a day.
Quota met, time to kick back.
Wish they had one for meaty programming topics.
Maybe TFS should have noted something about how this feat was accomplished (you know, the "tech" angle), instead of going on about "flowers in their hair."
I'm not complaining one way or the other, but given that summary it should be obvious what kind of comments are going to follow.
What is this 2015?
**Life is too short to be serious**
If you can get to escape velocity then you can get to Mars. And that's something that you can buy for not very much money in spacecraft terms. Maybe not $10M, but $20M should do it. India has ICBMs with enough "throw weight" to push a reasonable sized small spacecraft (100kg) to escape velocity.
If your probe doesn't have to do very much, then it can be pretty inexpensive. $10M buys a lot of space hardware.
The challenge is in the people and doing the navigation. India is a low wage country (compared to the US), which helps. You'd need to buy time on something like the Deep Space network (or get it via an international memorandum of understanding) - not just everyone has a big enough antenna and transmitter to send the signal to the probe, and to receive it. Could a 20m antenna (there's a fair number of those around) do it? Maybe. The Mars rovers send back 8 kbps using a 10W transmitter and a 8" diameter antenna to DSN (probably a 34 m antenna for the ground station). For nav, all you need to be able to do is turn around the carrier, which takes less power.
The ISRO Mars mission also leveraged a lot of spare parts from Chandrayaan. So you're not starting from scratch.
18 months to assemble and launch is fast, compared to NASA, but then, NASA is very, very risk averse, so there's a lot of reviews and cross checks during the development and build process - a typical schedule would be 3 years for NASA. The typical NASA Mars mission has a lot more instruments and complexity, which drives up the spacecraft cost and mass as well. A billion dollar Mars rover weighing 1000kg is probably launched by a fairly big $150M rocket, for instance.
.. the martian took millions of people to Mars!
no I'm pretty sure there are some influential Indians among the people who took over Slashdot.
Indians only care about India. they're self-exotifying and it's sickening. the British really did a number on them, so now they're second only to China in the sheer scale of pure bullshit riddling their academe.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
No, this is a submission that's clearly trying to divide engineering into an us-versus-them situation, in this case along gender lines. The technology aspect of it is incidental. If technology and engineering were really the focus of this submission then gender wouldn't have been mentioned at all. Gender is irrelevant when it comes to engineering. We should be celebrating the accomplishments of all engineers, without focusing on particular physical traits of the people involved.
"Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees"
When I was a boy one of my heroes was Marie Curie, and it didn't particularly bother me one way or another that she had no penis. So
a) why would these women be a hero only for "girls in India and beyond"? Their achievements had nothing to do with their womanhood, it was technical.
b) why would these women not be heroes for "boys?" Do their vaginas disqualify them from the possibility of admiration by humans with penises?
This comes up so often "why spend money on space when there are problems on Earth". Let me propose the above hashtag as a quick response. The answer to the question can be found here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10371953&cid=54056437 via @slashdot
Hollywood should be sending money to fund women making space rockets instead of movies ?
How does that model work to fund more movies?
And when that model sucks all the money out of Hollywood - how do they send money?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
That would explain why they are sending their shittiest people to America. Flush the toilet and all.
A few months and several million kilometers later, the orbiter prepared to enter Mars' gravity. This was a critical moment.
By the way, logic brought to you from milliona of dollars spent by NASA. If it wasn't for NASA spending billions, these folks wouldn't know that there was a critical moment.
"Standing on the shoulders of Giants" these writers forget.
Lastly, congrats for being cost effective... But "First guys through always pays and gets bloody"
Following the loss of Mars Observer ($813 million), NASA adopted a new low-cost philosophy of "Faster, Better, Cheaper" Mars missions. Mars Pathfinder was the first FBC mission and was a resounding success. Mars Climate Orbiter was then sent to Mars with a launch rocket cost of just $91.7 million, for a total mission cost of $327.6 million. This was the mission that was lost due to a English vs. metric mixup. The problem would've been caught on the ground in preliminary testing, but that testing had been eliminated as a cost-saving measure. A month later, Mars Polar Lander was lost due to (we think) the descent software misidentifying vibrations from the deployment of the landing legs as contact with the ground, cutting off the descent engine about 40 meters above the ground.
NASA subsequently abandoned the low-cost philosophy. Better to lose an expensive mission due to bad luck, than to lose a bunch of cheap missions due to dumb mistakes that would've been caught if we'd paid for some simple but thorough testing.
Have them make 'The Martian' then also, to save money. Not sure about Bollywood theme music, though.
Table-ized A.I.
The Mangalyaan is old news. India is already working on Chandrayaan 2 which will have a lunar lander and Mangalyaan 2 which may have a lander. China is working on a space station. Yes its cheaper to do stuff in India but the focus should not be on just the cost, it should be on India building up capability to do stuff. BTW the reason its cheaper to do stuff in India is salaries can be lower as the salaries of the working class are at survival levels. Something to grow out of not celebrate.
**Life is too short to be serious**
nt
Re: Einstein theory cost less..doesnt mean that it is useless..get u r head screwed.
Amuse me, in USofA, Kardashian makes more than a college grad. Kettle calling stove black!!
An innovative new idea coming from an Indian company, unprecedented cost cutting was achieved by employing women instead of men. A spokesperson form the company has said "Well its just fantastic isn't it, we didn't hire any immigrants to controversially cut costs and upset Joe public. Instead we used women which is actively encouraged these days and I think we are going to see a lot more of this."
Look, this is why H1B is a complete anti-American scam.
You let those cheap tech [sic] workers [sic] in, and they undercut properly-trained, Constitutionally-endowed Americans because they don't give a damn about our RIGHTS.
We the People of the United States are a people endowed with RIGHTS. That's why we are expensive because we DESERVE it. We are endowed with the sense of equality, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. WE are a nation with an exceptional DESTINY nowhere else to be found.
You let those fungible, mindless Oriental hacks in and undercut Us the People. Yes, for now you may be able to do that, but you get what you pay for. No amount of their cheap remissions sent home can buy them Liberty. Their BRAINS are incapable of grokking that.
If YOU don't invest in America's future, America will leave you no future.
America will rise again. Be warned.
Watch the white male supremacist mob freaking out and foaming at their mouths. Pretty disgusting.
Ladies -- let me congratulate you and let me tell you that I am (I'm a Westerner and a man) pretty ashamed of the behaviour some of those like me put on display.
You work hard, you have dreams. That's the spirit. Those old white guys do neither, that's why they are so sad. Might they slowly die out.
Pointing out that underpaid scientists and actors will get the job done if you beat them hard enough? I know that, thank you, go fuck yourself!
all this story does is make extremely wealthy corporatists drool and jizz their stockings. the idea that the brightest minds could be coerced into working for less is all they're fucking born for. it's sad that everyone involved was not paid significantly more money.
My! Having a bad day (or bad outlook on life), are we?
I'm not one either, but: let's remodel your home, or buy a car, or write software exactly to your specs. Or just do something expensive like build a spaceship campus. Fine. The people that did your job may not be the brightest but are smart or (hopefully) they wouldn't be there
So why are YOU cheaping out on THEM ? Forget paying what they asked for, forget trying to manage or lower the costs, pay them 99.9% of your net worth -- they're worth more than the pittance they want!
Oh, don't wanna? Me either. The more you have left, the more things you can do or have done. And by the way: the engineers obviously thought it was worth it or they wouldn't have done it in the first place. Economics.
The corporate beancounters look at ROI and risks. They don't like money sinks; that's their job. Someone else gets to decide whether to actually act or not -- whether the intangibles outweigh the tangibles (beans) in their judgement. Given enough losses and everyone loses their job.
Sounds like you disagree with, well, all of them. Become a wealthy corporatist and show them the error of their ways -- but if outgo always exceeds income, you won't be there long.
-----
And now offtopic: Perhaps I'm a wealthy corporatist. (I'm not.) "millions of people are starving", ie the poor. Yep. Lets give them, say $74 million, that'll fix it, right? Nope? How about more? How much more? Oh, now they want to eat a second time? OK, more money still. When do you stop; when they're not hungry? OK, done. Oh, you're tired of rice and beans and want something better? OK how about steaks (India? How about fish and chicken?) Oh by the way those poor by definition can't pay, so the people DOING all this are doing it for free, as well as transportation and energy. Humanitarians! Or they're not, the Government is paying for it. But what's that? In general the people; government is simply the controlling steward. Fine. As above, this works great until you hit zero resources, then EVERYONE is now hungry with no one to "save" them. That worked well -- until it didn't.
So: how do you continually feed the poor without going broke or forcing the providers to do it for free in which case they'll become broke? Solve that and you can literally BECOME your own wealthy corporation with the accolations and adoration of billions.
News: Bakeries allowed to buy subsidized flour are supposed to use 90 percent of it for bread and only 10 percent in cakes and pastries.
Even with subsidized flour, bakers say the official bread price -- currently 250 bolivars a loaf (35 US cents) -- does not cover the cost of production.
Bakers are increasingly nervous.
Really, I feed bad for the poor and gave 10% of my income to charities. (Used to, my income has wildly changed and I've got to figure out a new number.) But I'm not a humanitarian, 10% is about as much as I'm willing to go. And that money goes exactly where *I* want it to, not someone else deciding for me. And I'm not doing anything for Venezuela -- they're not my country and too far away. I'll help my local poor here; the actual humanitarians can help them.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
The cost of living in Delhi is, for a one bedroom apartment in the center, 16400 rupees on average which is about 250 USD. The average cost of living in New York is 3900 USD, so that's 15.6 times more expensive. Taking that into account, the converted cost of this mission was 1.15 billion USD, making this a pretty damn expensive mission, especially considering that it had a smaller and less capable spacecraft than US efforts.
And before you tell me that New York is so expensive: so is Delhi if you're an Indian.
This is why so much work has moved over to low wage countries. They're _cheaper_. And it is only a great example of how to run a project if your dream is to have the kind of living conditions that Indians enjoy.
So does that also mean it is now cheaper to have India actually send a man to the moon than to have Hollywood fake it?
---
This article is really deep throat choking on chick cock isn't it
NASA Engineers don't live in NYC. They live in the suburbs of Houston, JPL, MSFC, KSC where the costs of living are1/3rd of NYC.
When I lived outside JSC, my rent was $450/month (utilities included). I moved to a cheaper place on the water for $335/month. My commute to the office in Nassau Bay was 5 min.
I lived on $30K/yr, which I happen to know worked for a family of 4, if they were careful with their budget. That was 25+ yrs ago.
NYC - pfffft. Nice place to visit. Sorta like SF. Wouldn't want to live there. Ah - I get it. Delhi - wouldn't want to live there either. I like potable water from every faucet and toilets and not tripping over people that live inside a cardboard box. Underground sewers are nice too.
OTOH, many Indian women are HOT, in a different way than California women or NYC women or Texas women!
So, Indians - How much would it cost to send Matt Damon to Mars? Pls?
At least they're still nowhere near as self-absorbed, self-obsessed and ignorant of the rest of the world as Americans.
This space intentionally left blank
We should be celebrating the accomplishments of all engineers, without focusing on particular physical traits of the people involved.
Your next line is "All lives matter." HTH, HAND!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because they are corporate whores, not nerds. There is a difference.
The most important instrument, the methane detector, also didn't work:
https://thewire.in/85859/methane-isro-msm-spectroscopy/
A conceptual design flaw,according to the article above as the CO2 signal, predictable present on Mars, cannot be separate from methane. /. makes no mention of this, instead praising how it was designed by a woman, Moumita.
The article posted on
Your mentally that cheap means it is low quality is absolutely what is wrong with the world today. Working within a budget is not something to look down on, but you are too stupid to understand.
The Martian might have cost more to make, but in the end it made a half billion dollar profit. Comparing the profit of the two projects makes just as much sense as comparing the costs, doesn't it?
Some women have problems, which mostly can be solved -- and many women won't even have any problem at all.
But idiot men generalize and say "women ar such" or "women are like that" etc.
Because they suffered such prejudice, or even because -- like their counterpart males -- they are also idiots, some women generalize that men are all idiots and are after them or will get jealous if they succeed (which in fact happens, fortunately no that often, but with grave consequences nonetheless).
If we want to get rid of aggressive feminists, let us first expose those men who gaslight women or deprecate their work (e.g. as mothers). If we get rid of the chauvinists, maybe women can live a better life -- a worthy target in itself. Of course, provided we reach such a utopic world, a minority of idiot women will still consider all men chauvinists... but then they will be annoying both for men and for women.
Obviously you have never met an Indian.
"If you are interested in Indian women scientists and engineers....'"
Sure!
Are there easy-payment plans? What are the shipping rates like? Is there a warranty?
Headline is wrong.. it was and is *engineers* who build rockets and spacecraft and fly them, whether in India, the US, or elsewhere.
The scientists have a question that needs to be answered by the equipment that engineers build and fly (and an army of machinists, technicians, PWB assembly people, etc.).
Seriously? Americans are bad but most Indians I meet won't try other cultures food AT ALL. I met an Indian dude while I was living in singapore that had lived there 5 years and had never tried any other cuisine.
But we judge white people for that. Not Indians of course. Or the way they treat women, or etc etc.
Fuck your American hatred and narrowness. You know nothing. Go live abroad before you say stupid shit.
Because the story poster chose to spin in a typically sexist, feminist fashion. If they'd discussed, say, this probe's launcher - a PSLV-XL medium-lift launcher - there'd be comments about its design, probably comparing it to the SpaceX launcher family. If they'd discussed the probe's instruments - a couple of cameras, some spectrometers, and a mass spectrometer - there might have been comments about, say, the data rate required to get useful information from them back to Earth. Instead, the summary presented it as an accomplishment specifically of an all-women team, dismissing the work of all the men who contributed to the project, and fitting the bigotry of those who promote continued sexual discrimination in STEM ... and so, the comments are a criticism of this.
Nobody sensible would consider that a meaningful comparison either.
Second the Martian made a profit, and the mars mission hasn't. So the Mars mission actually had a much higher net cost.
I would sincerely hope that any space mission will net a far better return for the entire human race than 2 hours of fictional bullshit on the big screen, so I think we can stop with this rather silly comparison now.
2 hours of tape for which people paid $630,000,000 to watch. Personally I prefer the footage of actual mars missions but even at the price of nothing you still get far fewer eyeballs then the fictional, "human drama" centered bullshit
"Mission designer Ritu Karidhal had worked 48 hours straight, fueled by anticipation." ...and a 55-gallon drum of coffee.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I am American. Can confirm.
Instead of "Houston, we have a problem" we'll have "Mumbai, do me the needful."
RatPoopzo taking someone out of context? No... seriously; this is a TECHNOLOGY story, not gender baiting click-bait.
Please do the needful.
Seriously. It is. Epic. #done
When's the next kickstarter for sending a bitching ass monster truck made out of SCIENCE to Mars instead of paying to see another awful cheesey (but funny) science fiction film?
$30 contrib, you get your credits on the mission.
$1000, credits on any filmed recordings of the project
$10,000, come to watch the thing launch
$100,000, get to visit the team working on the project
$1 million, team visit as above, as well as tour of the facility and watch as it gets built.
LITERALLY FUND IT.
I'd sooner pay to see some solid science done. That would provide far more as a collective form of joy and fulfilment than the simple short-term entertainment would. Fulfilment is vastly superior.
The amounts of money people hand over for short-term entertainment is crazy.
As well as shit junk food, or food they don't eat because they bought too much or ate out and it goes off.
You want to know how I avoid the problem of buying too much? There's 4 meals where I don't buy food for, if I don't go out or eat with friends or family, I simply do not eat. Problem solved. (I only eat twice a day at that, three meals is just too much man, and I'm not even a skeleton or dying of hyper illness)
Periodic fasting is good for you anyway.
I wonder if a purely science tax would be worth it or not?
One aimed at initiatives that expand human knowledge on a global scale, rather than things that just improve say, battery capacity, or generic materials science.
Put it on all non-essential luxury and entertainment goods at a low rate, and all unhealthy shit at a higher rate. 100% of it goes to science.
Let people do whatever the hell they want to themselves, just make them pay for it a little bit more. Speaking tiny amounts of tax, mere cents for non-essentials, it all adds up over the hundred millions in an average region, most people waste that on using 2 extra bits of toilet paper than is necessary! (and that is only one item. people regularly buy multiple non-essential junk items per week)
I'd gladly pay more to see hilariously awful science films and play videogames while sending money directly to science initiatives, while occasionally eating the unhealthy junk at a higher rate.
Of course, I know most won't. When people hear tax, they think "dey stealin ma money! tax is theft!".
Yeah, good luck with a 100% privately owned society, idiots. People take tax-funded services for granted. They have no idea how bad it would be without them being paid for transparently.
No, this is a submission that's clearly trying to divide engineering into an us-versus-them situation, in this case along gender lines.
Uhm... no. There were two submissions merged; the second one-sentence summary may be excerpted from something longer. For the "main" submission, there are a number of differences mentioned in TFS (USA vs India, NASA vs ISRO, expensive vs cheap, slow vs fast development time), and the comment section has chosen to focus on one particular difference to the exclusion of others. That says more about the comment section than it does about TFS.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
for women.
and from which nation did your ancestors ply their wares fuckwad? racist much?
And service started failing for me; same in quora and amazon. But their promoted scientist here is under my sphere of influence.
Wow, those ladies must surely have said "we're gonna have to science the shit out of this"
Sounds like a Mexican pun. They sent a rocket to detect farts but there was too much belching so it was all fuzzy and a waste. Do not underestimate that kind of messaging, it _seems_ people do send them much to my dismay now that I am discovering it.
And a can of Campbell's soup costs less than a Warhol painting of a can of Campbell's soup!!! How is this even news???