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India just landed on the Moon for less than it cost to make Interstellar | The Independent::undefined
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Why is this even a comparison? India only went to the moon, interstellar had to go to other freaking solar systems and a black hole to make their documentary!
With humans aswell and robots!
Robots with feelings! Do you know how many consecutive milestones they nailed?
Cool.
The average income in India is 25x ish less than that of the US. If we scale the $75 million cost to land on the moon by 25 times, we get $1.8 billion. The Perseverance rover’s cost is estimated at $2.75 billion and that thing landed on Mars.
It’s incredibly impressive that India has landed on the moon on their 2nd try. Nothing should take away from that, and India should be very proud of their achievement. But geez this is a braindead article. Yes, poorer countries can pay people less do the same amount of work as someone in another country.
I respectfully disagree with you. It’s a bit misleading to compare average incomes like that. I would assume the income disparity is nowhere near as large for valuable scientists and engineers working for a national space program. In addition, you are only comparing labour costs. Some materials can be cheaper in India, but certainly not by a factor of 25 and certainly not all of them. Therefore, I wouldn’t say the article is braindead.
The difference in income is by about 9-10 time. Salary for a NASA scientist can go in the range of ₹1 to 2 crores (converted from dollar to rupees). For a ISRO scientist however, they may earn in ₹10-15 lakhs.
I’ve made a comment explaining why the mission was so cost-effective, you can read it here. But yes, salary is not even one of the main reasons.
For people who are not able to understand lakhs and crores, it’s a part of the numbering system used in India. For the international numbering system equivalent, you can read this comment.
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You mean the international numbering system? It hasn’t got anything to do with the metric system the former is a positional system in the power of tens and the latter a decimal-based system of measurement, but I can understand that most people outside of South Asia might probably not understand, so here you go.
I’m taking the salary of NASA employees from this page - this is about five years old, so I’m sure the new wages would be slightly higher. GS-15 are the top-level employees at NASA, who earn around $105,123 to $136,659. $136,659 is about ₹11,295,344.66.
From this site, we see that ISRO scientists earn around ₹720,000 to ₹2,400,000). S Somanath, the chairman of ISRO, has disclosed to the local media that he earns about ₹250,000 per months, so on a yearly basis, it would be around ₹3,000,000, which is almost accurate with the salary given in the above site.
Taking the highest range of salary, 11,295,344.66/2,400,000 ~= 4.71 approximately. I’d imagine that low-level employees earn about 8-10 times less than their NASA counterparts. Now, this is not the best way to calculate the difference in wage, perhaps I should’ve taken the mean and gone about with it, but it should still give you a rough idea about how misleading the “25 times less income” claim is.
Except that the cost wasn’t lowered because of the labour. It has everything to do with how well-optimised the rocket launch was. And by well-optimised, I’m talking about extremely optimised launch.
The launch location was the most important factor here - SDSC (Satish Dhawan Space Centre), Sriharikota. This particular region allows a rocket to be launched in the eastern direction, taking advantage of the Earth’s rotation.
Sriharikota is also located closer to the equator, making it easier to break out into the space thanks to the extra centripetal force. Neither does the USA, China or Russia have that advantage. African nations in the future may have a lot of advantage, especially countries in the eastern coast like Egypt, Somalia and Ethiopia.
Another reason for the low cost was that the organisation had lots of experience sending launch vehicles to the outer space.
Some parts had to be outsourced from international companies, which may also add to making this mission not being cost-effective. By just saying that the wage of scientist was x times less, you’re invalidating the efforts of ISRO scientists in low-cost material research.
This comparison is predicated on every part of the manufacturing process occurring in each country. As soon as India are buying parts from other countries they’re not paying India prices anymore
Some guy at NASA: “We estimate that the cost of this part should cost 1.8Million dollars. “
Some guy in India: “You know, my cousin can make that part for 35 dollars”
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These titles are dumb.
“NASA’s 1969 moon landing was with a computer that can’t even power Doom!”
Did you know scientists created ways to use crabs as logic gates?
Someone calculated we need about 8 billion crabs in order to run Doom.
Now that is scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
That’s a crab fact.
Now you’re talking Nonce Sense.
Pretty sure that was the amount to store the files for the game, not actually run it.
They did surgery on a grape
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Aside from different approaches I think the biggest factor is salary difference. Still impressive though a good example for other Asian nations.
Modern US space projects are also basically welfare programs for aerospace companies.
Yeah but interstellar went to a black hole and back
Can we not have the hundred identical stupid jokes in the comment section like we did in reddit?
It’s a human thing not a Reddit thing
How dare people have fun
Can we not compare a science fiction film about traversing entire solar systems and fucking time travel to landing on the…moon?
Let’s also get rid of complete transcription of short videos while we’re at it. Everyone else saw the video, no need to quote every part
Transcription is usually something done for deaf people. Like people transcribing memes for the blind.
That’s not what I’m talking about. On most of the video subreddits, the whole comment section is just quotes and laughing emojis.
Bollywood should start filming on-site.
Nah. The bad CGI is what makes it so so good
But consider the low gravity dances!
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Yes and it’s incredibly annoying to me. More. Some houses cost more than Indian space agency spent on getting to the moon.
I mean, it’s still a valid sentence. Some houses do cost less. We’re just defining the word some so loosely it’s almost insulting.
I prefer Interstellar.
Overrated movie. I’ll take real science and progress any day over imaginary nonsense that’ll never happen.
A world with only “real” science and progress but without any entertainment would be quite boring.
And fiction has been key to inspiring the next generation of scientists/engineers. So many NASA people have claimed to be inspired by Star Trek just to pick one.
Hey, but I managed to write software to calibrate µCT-scanners! That is clearly way more inspiring than all this fictional stuff. Right! Right. Right?
You bet your bippy that’s inspiring! An un-calibrated scanner just doesn’t hit the same way.
Based on the way specialized code is used, your calibration software will still be in use when they open the first scanning facility on the Moon.
Hope you accounted for the Y10K problem!
Thing is that AI can help. My SO worked in a firm that does skill extraction from CVs and job ads. They do really cool stuff to match job ads with CVs using EU skill tags! It’s a really good tool to do specific things, so I really hate all the latest articles about LLMs.
I do find myself ignoring this kind of article, too, usually. I really enjoy discovering a totally new domain where the technology is implemented in a totally new way, going well beyond language applications even.
I dream of a ‘language’ model that specializes in general machine to machine communication. It almost surely exists already, but in my line of work, machine interfacing is an endless nightmare. A ‘protocol droid’ would be such a help.
TOS ran 1966-june3rd1969, Russia first landed unmanned in 1959, and the human race through NASA and the Apollo program first landed on the moon on june 20th 1969
Isaac Asimov was a biochemist born in 1920, started writing published sci-fi in 1939 and full on scifi novels in 1950 (seriously, this stuff was wayyyyy ahead of its time). Died in 1992.
Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921, died in 1991.
The black hole simulation for interstellar resulted in 3 highly regarded scientific papers.
I really liked the first two thirds of that film before they went into the black hole
But Interstellar had a box office of $715 million.
The astronautics is a very expensive sector and with completely uncertain returns on earnings.
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.
