Mani Samani
Team Member

t does not matter that the creation of

India’s Mars Orbiter, Mangalyaan, cost one-
tenth the cost of NASA's Maven spacecraft
(or less than many Hollywood blockbusters).
What is significant is that their spacecraft
reached the red planet’s orbit as soon as its
US counterpart arrived there. Now these two
are in orbit and collecting data together.

NASA's mission cost $637 million “...

and we came in under budget!” said the
primary investigator on the project, Bruce
Jakosky, in an interview with NPR. “It's
essentially buying a Honda Civic verses
buying a Mercedes S-Class,” said Amaresh
Kollipara, a managing partner of Earth 2
Orbit, a company that pairs private satellite
providers with the Indian Space Research
Organization. The Mangalyaan satellite is
alot less mature than MAVEN, and is not
designed to last as long as NASA’s spacecraft.

In terms of the technical view, NASA’s
spacecraft still has the advantage, since
India chose a cheaper orbit around the Mars.
The Indian satellite did not go as close to
Mars as the US spacecraft. Less engine use
means that Mangalyaan requires less fuel,
keeping the weight down to half of the NASA
mission. A lower fuel load also made the
Indian project much cheaper to launch.

The primary investigator of the project
said, "We had, at one point, over 600 people
working on the project." Although it

takes a lot of people to build a spacecraft,
and of course they need to be paid, India
claimed that their top-notch aerospace
engineers are cheap. The average payment
for Indian engineers in this project was
$12 000 per year which is significantly less
than a regular minimum wage worker in
North America. Chairman of Indian Space

Research Organisation, Mr. Radhakrishnan,
called the Mars Orbiter Mission “The
cheapest interplanetary mission ever

to be undertaken by the world.”

Despite India’s achievement in space, is it
an appropriate comparison to NASA's big
spacecraft? Dr. Erik Jensen, Professor and
Chair of Physics department at UNBC said, “I
would say the biggest milestone... is showing
that India can do these things because for

$00,000,000 -

$700,000,000 ~

$600,000,000 -

$500,000,000

$400,000,000 +

$300,000,000

$200,000,000

$100,000,000 ~

More Expensive things than Mangalyaan

S-
Indian Edvard Munch's New York's most The production The Most NASA MAVEN
Mangalyaan The Scream expensive home of GTAV Expensive Space Probe
Satellite Movie; Pirates of

the Caribbean:
At World's End

India Times

so long [the] Americans and the Soviets, and
then the Japanese and Chinese, have done
some interesting things in space... as far as
exploration, there are so many countries
that have done so many... exploration kind of
missions. This is... India making [a] statement
that they are reaching... [the] ability to [do]
these kind of things.” Although Canada has
the infrastructure and technical expertise
available, there is not the national will to
spend money on extensive space exploration.

Can we actually compare India’s orbit
mission with NASA's spacecraft? “They
published some pictures from... the surface
of Mars and they are nothing like the high
resolution images that... NASA’s spacecraft
is giving... it would be hard to imagine

that it will be equal in quality.” Dr. Jensen
continued, “There is no cheap way to do
that, because most of the things that NASA
does is of the highest quality... and it is
extremely expensive because they are only
building one of them.” Despite the capability
to make cheaper satellites, NASA doesn’t
have any interest in doing so because it

is not beneficial to send low capability
spacecraft to that kind of distance.

India's space ambitions are not over
either. The next step may be putting
an astronaut into orbit for cheap.