From CNN: “And India reached Mars with significantly less money. With a price tag of $74 million, the Mars Orbiter Mission cost a mere fraction of the $671 million NASA spent on its MAVEN spacecraft”
I’m expecting lower labor costs, and perhaps less advanced instrumentation. What else contributes to the almost tenfold lower cost?
news was that they only made one model. sourced locally and off the shelf. it does have less functions than others.
throw it together and hope.
NASA’s motto used to be “faster, better, cheaper”. The engineers working at NASA added “…pick any two of the three”. It looks like India chose faster and cheaper.
Because India? That is not an insult either. Different costs for a developing nation - cheaper labor, cheaper parts, combined with LOADS of recently educated Indians returning home with maybe a chip on their shoulder about India’s standing in the world and wanting to do something about it.
On a tangentially related note, the more people doing science the better! Rock on, India.
I once heard Neil Degrasse Tyson say that only about 28 to 30% of NASA’s budget was devoted to scientific research. The rest went to various other expenses, much of it related to marketing and promotion.
On that basis it seems India may achieve quite a bit in terms of national pride, even if the orbiter doesn’t actually reveal anything about Mars.
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It was probably cheaper because they had a certified Microsoft certified technician call to tell them how to remove all the bugs in the system by remote for just $299.
For one thing, the spacecraft is about half the mass. Really, it’s sort of less than that, because the Indian spacecraft had to use some of its own fuel to escape Earth orbit, while With MAVEN the Centaur upper stage did that. The payload mass a quarter of MAVEN’s. Now that doesn’t tell the whole story obviously, but I think it tells a lot of it. You get to put on fewer instruments, and they have to be smaller. Launch vehicle is much cheaper. Probably need fewer people designing everything.
Cite? When have you ever seen a NASA ad on TV? When has NASA sponsored a sporting event? That’s what marketing is. If you mean they spend a lot on education, you’re wrong there too.
NASA is a public institution, so it’s budget is publicly available. Here’s the 2015 budget estimate. Education is listed at $88.9M, which is 0.5% of the total budget.
Looking into it further, the launch vehicle used to launch the Mars Orbiter Mission seems to have… interesting design choices. First stage is solid (with 6 solid boosters), reasonable enough. Second stage is liquid fueled (UDMH/N2O4), fine. Third is solid again (why did they go back to solid?), and fourth is liquid (MMH/MON). I don’t really get the rationale for switching fuel type at every stage like this. Was it designed around existing rocket motors or stages? Having a final stage liquid fueled makes sense for some orbital insertions, assuming it can be restarted (don’t see confirmation of this in the article). Solid first and third stages, fine, but why go liquid for the second stage if you’re going back to solid for the third? They’re using hypergolic propellants, so you’re not really getting better specific impulse over solid fuel. Doesn’t make much sense to me unless, as I alluded to earlier, these are what sort of stages they already had designed.
Yeah, that’s what “off the shelf” means. You use whatever equipment you have available, and fit it together as needed.
Paid advertising is hardly the only kind of marketing. NASA is in the news all the time. They produce press releases, provide access and information to journalists, etc. And NASA’s most important constituency isn’t the public, it’s Congress, to approve its budgets. That kind of “promotion and marketing” isn’t going to appear as a line item in a budget. Each one of NASA’s divisions will also be doing this kind of promotion on its own behalf.
Small possibility that some of the tech was stolen from the US or USSR.
Yes, Mangalyaam was kept in a parking orbit after launch before heading off to Mars.
They’re fond of pointing out that an actual Mars shot cost only $75 million, while filming *Gravity *took $100M.
Somewhere below, a little Martian is muttering to himself:
“Ooh, those pesky Earthlings, always spying on me. They make me sooo angry! But I’ll show them. As soon as my Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator is complete. Then let’s see how they like an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”
It was put in a parking orbit by the launcher, and then the probe used its own engine to break free of Earth’s orbit. In this case it probably wouldn’t need a fourth stage restart.
I can’t necessarily add much except background, but India’s space program, especially around the time the PSLV was being developed has often operated under technology transfer limitations, so it is quite likely that they would have to work around limitations in terms of component availability. Which, the engineer in me wants to add, is a perfectly valid design dimension.
It’s 40+ year old tech (based on the Viking lander dates); I imagine they could have figured it out by now.
They outsourced the labor to Bangladesh.
There’s a term for this sort of coverage: earned media. The idea that large percentages of NASA’s budget is going to generating earned media simply isn’t credible at all.