India's mission to Mars Mangalyaan Budget

Late Tuesday night, India's Mars Orbiter Mission successfully went into orbit around Mars, after a ten-month, 420 million-mile journey.

The craft (also known as Mangalyaan, Hindi for "Mars Craft") won't conduct any groundbreaking science — it's primarily a demonstration vehicle. But it is a huge deal for India's emerging space program.

Consider this: only the US, Russia, and the European Union have had successful Mars missions so far. What's more, more than half of all previously attempted missions have failed — including the first attempts made by the US, Russia, and China.

How to get to Mars on a shoestring

The craft is launched on November 5, 2013. (Nathan G./Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the craft's success is that it was made entirely with homegrown Indian technologies — and was produced on a remarkably small budget.

The entire mission cost $74 million. As Narenda Modi pointed out during a June visit to an Indian rocket facility, that's less than it cost to make the movie Gravity (the film's budget was about $100 million).

It is, by far, the cheapest successful interplanetary mission ever carried out. Here's a comparison to the most recent Mars orbiters launched by NASA (MAVEN), the European Space Agency (Mars Express), Japan (Nozomi), and Russia (Phobos-Grunt). The latter two missions failed to reach Mars.

Keeping the costs of space exploration as low as possible is especially important for a country like India — critics point out that the country might be better served spending that money on public health or poverty reduction, as a fifth of its population still lives below the poverty line.

But the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) minimized expenses in a number of ways. It was able to use relatively small rockets because the scientific payload is extremely light (about 33 pounds, compared to MAVEN's 143 pounds), and relied heavily on proven, established launch technologies it's previously used to launch satellites.

Additionally, the entire mission was carried out in an extremely short time — about a year from approval to launch. Perhaps most importantly, salaries of engineers and other specialists are simply lower in India — the ISRO's total budget is $1.2 billion per year, compared to $17.5 billion for NASA.

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