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"The mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m)." Wow. That's amazingly cheap!
by sanj 18y ago
"The mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m)."
Wow. That's amazingly cheap!
- rit 18y agoIf I recall correctly, part of the way that NASA is setup is to be deliberately spread out across many congressional districts - making it hard to cut it's legs out from under it because it will effect jobs in too many congressman's districts. The downside to this is that it's also a great way of bringing lots of bullshit jobs into a district, and makes things VERY expensive. Not surprising that India can do this cheaply - hopefully some of our private sector space companies will learn from what they're doing and improve on it.
- eru 18y agoIt is still somewhat surprising that India can do this cheaply. After all they government is even more inefficient in general.
- jessewmc 18y agoKeep in mind how much of the cost is people-hours, which would be on the order of 10-20 times more in the United States.
- helveticaman 18y agoThat's within the budget of many Silicon Valley duders. I would suspect that figure belies some costs they aren't taking into account.
- chollida1 18y ago> Silicon Valley duders What is a "duder"? Is that equivalent to "Silicon Valley dudes"?
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoA "duder" would be a person that made dudes.
- helveticaman 18y agoReally? From urbandictionary: "Duder is a word of many possibilites. It can be used as a replacement for dude. It can also be used to mean someone is more dude-like than someone else (as in dude, duder, dudest.) It has also been known to be used to describe objects for which the name has been temporarily forgotten, or otherwise unknown to the user of the word. Still yet another usage is a verb which means the act of being a dude or doing dudely things."
- jyothi 18y agoI would believe the opposite. It is India, labor and infra costs would be much lower. In fact the actual spend would be lesser than $78M considering departments always over bill on construction/development costs.
- stcredzero 18y agoSpace launch is just not as hard as we've been led to believe by those sucking at the government teat. In 1980, a 2nd world country was getting ready to assemble a launch system that would've attained launch costs as low as $600 per kg. (This would've been limited to hardened or bulk cargoes due to high G forces, but that's still awesome and damn useful!) The price of this system was only $25 million (1980.) That's a game changing technology and it's still within the reach of a group of "Silicon Valley duders." http://www.astronautix.com/country/iraq.htm http://www.astronautix.com/country/iraq.htm
- dmix 18y agoYour missing one variable: profit. No rich silicon valley duder is going to spend $25 million unless hes gets a return.
- helveticaman 18y agoWould status count as a kind of profit?
- subbu 18y agoTo put it in perspective, this is less than what Microsoft paid for PowerSet ($100 million for a search engine), Farecast ($112 million for a airfare pricing comparision tool) or less than what Google paid for FeedBurner ($100 million for a RSS reader). The satellite plans to do a detailed mapping of the entire lunar surface. If a web startup built an application in the lines of Google Maps using these mappings that would probably sell for more than $78 million, more than the whole cost of the Moon mission. Bit if an exaggeration but you get the point.