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India just landed on the Moon for less than it cost to make Interstellar | The Independent
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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It's almost as if doing this first, half a century ago, and, pardon my culturism, but probably less recklessly AND in a higher cost of living country would be substantially more expensive.
But still, a genuine congratulations to India and everybody that worked on that project.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, it's a fact. "We did it for SO CHEAP" is not a brag or a flex.
The cost to realtime process trajectories in 1968 was not the $10USD that a several year old, e-waste used iPhone is now.
And the yearly salary of NASA engineers now is 100k-150k USD (glassdoor.com) while the Indian space program engineer median yearly salary (payscale.com) looks to be 200k-3M INR (median 800,000), which is $2,400USD-35K USD (median 10,000USD).
So... Just on labor alone, that's a factor of 5-50x. Then, take into account the improvements in materials and tech that can be basically gotten off the shelf. You don't have to R&D reinvent tang anymore.
Like, yeah, cool, you did it, that's awesome. But then, trying to be like "oh we did it for so cheap" just makes me wonder how and then instantly realize that making me think about that undermines the very achievement it's trying to brag about.
And don't get it twisted: money is fucked up in the world right now. Just leave it at: You did it, India. Congratulations, one of only four countries in the world have done it.
You're probably being downvoted because nobody is drawing any comparisons to the Apollo missions, except yourself. You're defending a point nobody else is making.
The only cost comparison to other space missions I've seen is a one liner from the article which compares it to a current day Falcon launch. Which is a reasonable comparison and data point.
They put a rover on the moon.
This is much more similar to the Mars rovers than to Apollo. Those were still much more expensive than this was. Although for understandable reasons like cost of living in US vs India and salary differences.
Manned missions are more expensive in part because humans and human life support is really heavy. The Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever launched. Those things were expensive.