India Plans Mars Mission in 2013 171
New submitter susmit writes with news of India's new goal for launching a satellite to Mars in 2013. From the article: "India plans to launch a mission to Mars next year, putting an orbital probe around the red planet to study its climate and geology, top space department officials said on Thursday. ... A 320-tonne Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket will be used to carry the orbiter spaceship, blasting off from the ISRO launch site at Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Another senior official at ISRO, requesting anonymity, estimated the cost of the mission at 4.0-5.0 billion rupees ($70-90 million dollars)."
Cheap $70-80 million if they stick to the budget. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheap $70-80 million if they stick to the budget. Now I want to know why it costs 20-50 times more in our developed western nations.
Re:Cheap $70-80 million if they stick to the budge (Score:2, Interesting)
Because it's probably gonna be more than that and then I'm quite sure something is gonna fail somwhere along the way. Just a few days ago one third of the population of India has been without electricty for a few hours. How about the government invest their money into a stable power grid first.
India - the land of big talk (Score:4, Interesting)
but I think it's more likely this will turn out like the $45 Aakash tablet computer did. Often when the price tag on something seems to good to be true, it is.
I've been watching India closely for the past 2 decades and the one conclusion that I got is that India likes to talk big, and after that, nothing
Of the numerous projects that they've announced, India achieved only one - the Chandrayaan moon satellite project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1 [wikipedia.org]
As for the others, I'm not that confident that they can deliver, on time, and/or on budget
Re:Cheap $70-80 million if they stick to the budge (Score:3, Interesting)
Sour grapes?
Yeah it's just another butt-hurt American who can't believe that some country he always thought of as technologically backward, because Hollywood always portrays the third world as dirt roads full of chickens, is actually capable of pulling something like this off. Space used to be the exclusive doman of America (fuck yeah!) since they "won" the space race. The only problem is they declared themselves the victors before the race had really even begun. Now as the tortoise overtakes the sleeping hare, he just tells himself that it doesn't matter, he reached that milepost 40 years ago, there's still plenty of time to sleep...