How India's ISRO Launched Its Mars Mission At Cut-rate Costs

Mars Orbiter liftoff on Nov 05, 2013 (Photo: ISRO website)

India’s space agency ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) spent a mere $75 million to launch a small spacecraft bound for Mars, 140 million miles away. Mangalyaan, Mars craft in Hindi, which took off earlier this week will be India’s first interplanetary mission and, if all goes well, will reach the Red Planet in September 2014 after a 300-day journey. That will make India the first Asian country, and the fourth in the world, to get to the planet.

Over the last five decades, India has spent a meager sum of money on its space program. The $75 million spent on the Mars mission – one commentator compared it with the budget of four big Bollywood movies — is a relatively trifling amount compared with the other four countries’ missions which cost billions of dollars. (Meanwhile, critics have deemed such an expense unwarranted in a country dogged by poverty.)

India is becoming known for low-cost innovation in diverse fields such as healthcare and education. The Mars mission is being cited as an example of the ingenuity which produces technology at stupendously low prices. The price tag on Mangalyaan has stirred the global space community.

In a conversation with Forbes, Kopillil Radhakrishnan, chairman of ISRO, explained how the agency made Mangalyaan the world’s least-expensive Mars endeavour:

1. “I don’t like the phrase ‘frugal engineering’. ISRO’s general philosophy is cost effectiveness. The Russians look for robustness and the Americans go after optimization. Our aim at ISRO was how do we get the Mars mission done on a budget.”

2. “We adopted a modular approach. Take the launch vehicle, for instance. We acquired the technology for the Vikas engine in the 1970s by working with the French. There was no money transaction. We have since produced 120 such engines with Indian materials and fully fabricated here. For every successive launch, we have taken the base of our previous, proven launch technology, modified and built on it. Here, we had to add the cryo to the previous module as we needed higher power. We used the same modular tactic with our payload. Our approach gave us cost and schedule advantages.”

3. “When we conducted ground tests – which are time consuming and expensive – we kept the number of tests small but wrung out the best out of each. This is our way, historically.”

4. “For transferring Mangalyaan from the earth’s orbit to Mars’ orbit, we used a couple of strategies to bring down fuel consumption drastically.”

5. “We are schedule-driven to the extreme. That prevents cost over-runs. This mission has taken 15 months from the time our Prime minister announced it in August last year it to the liftoff. In parts of Europe, even space scientists have 35-hour work weeks. Here, 18-hour days are common. During the launch period, many of our scientists were working for 20 hour-days. Being time effective makes us cost effective.”

The Mars craft will take nearly a month to build up the velocity to break free from the earth’s orbit and begin its long journey to Mars.