Just a flash back of the humble beginnings (must see, its almost unbelievable)…
Can’t source this, but I remember reading in a book that one of the components for our first Mars orbiter (this latest series, I mean) was sourced from either Radio Shack or Hewlett-Packard. Just went down to the store and bought the part.
Later, there was some concern if this part (a transmitter, maybe?) was rated for space travel, so they called the company. The engineering department dropped a brick when they heard what NASA wanted to do with their component, especially since it wasn’t space-rated.
In the end, they went with it, and the part worked fine.
Yeah, we were talking about this at work on Friday.
“Much cheaper than NASA’s much more complex mission”
:rolleyes: No shit?
Well, you can compare it to Mariner 9, which was NASA’s first successful mission to orbit Mars, and carried a weight very similar to the Indian mission into Mars orbit. The Mariner program, from 1962 to 1973, cost 554 million USD. (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?MCode=Mariner_09&Display=ReadMore). Assuming a linear spread across 10 launches, that’s 55.4 million USD. Accounting for inflation(assuming 1967 as the base year), I estimate that to be 387.8 million USD in today’s money. Even at PPP exchange rates(0.3, which probably overstates the value of the rupee, since the basket of goods for PPP is basic, not high tech) that’s still 150 million more than the cost of the Indian mission.