On Tuesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation, the national space agency, lobbed a three-thousand-pound spacecraft called Mangalyaan toward Mars. The orbiter’s mission is to map some of the planet’s surface and test for methane, a possible marker of life. If Mangalyaan reaches the Red Planet and swings into orbit on schedule next September, that alone would be a remarkable victory: more than half of the forty Mars missions launched around the world have failed. But the I.S.R.O.’s real achievement might lie in its sheer frugality.
Mangalyaan’s mission to Mars cost India seventy-three million dollars. For comparison, Boeing prices its least expensive commercial airplane at seventy-six million dollars. And by India’s profligate standards of public expenditure, the Mars Orbiter Mission has come cheap: an eight-lane bridge in Mumbai that opened in 2010 spans three miles and cost three hundred and forty million dollars; a proposed statue of a long-dead Indian politician—designed to stand twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty—will cost three hundred million dollars.
The I.S.R.O. has a reputation for austerity, exemplified in a famous photograph from 1981 of India’s APPLE satellite being transported on a bullock cart. The agency’s scientists are paid between twelve hundred and two thousand dollars a month, and, unusual for space programs, its equipment is endlessly tweaked and recycled: the rocket that carried the Mars orbiter into space was adapted from a launch vehicle that first flew in 1993. Only one physical model of Mangalyaan was ever produced. (The I.S.R.O. relied extensively on software for testing.)
Despite the fanfare surrounding the country’s first interplanetary mission, the Mangalyaan launch has revived a well-worn debate that has long surrounded India’s space program: Should a country that struggles to adequately feed so many of its people be spending money on missions to Mars? “We can go to Mars but cannot provide clean water to our people on Earth,” tweeted Tavleen Singh, a columnist for the Indian Express. On the evening of the launch, the social activist Harsh Mander noted with sadness that the distance between his son sleeping in his bed and the child sleeping on a sidewalk a kilometre away had suddenly become greater than the distance from India to Mars. Jean Drèze, a development economist working in New Delhi, said the Mars mission was “part of the Indian elite’s delusional quest for superpower status.”
Space programs are easy targets during difficult times; their long-term benefits appear frivolous next to putting food on tables or jobs on the market. NASA, for instance, lost seven hundred million dollars in funding between 2011 and 2012, in the teeth of the recession. But it has been difficult for Mangalyaan to provoke any credible outrage, primarily because the I.S.R.O. has cost the taxpayer so little. Mangalyaan’s seventy-three-million-dollar budget is a pittance compared to the twenty billion dollars that India will spend this year to provide subsidized food to two out of every three of its citizens, or the $5.3 billion that will be spent this year on a rural employment plan.
The financing of Mangalyaan has thus barely chipped at the edifice of the Indian welfare state. In fact, at 0.0039 per cent of its G.D.P., India’s expenditure on Mangalyaan has been neither lavish nor extraordinary; the United States spent a similar percentage of its G.D.P., 0.003 per cent, in 1962, on the doomed Mariner 1 probe to Venus, which cost eighteen and a half million dollars. The annual budget of the I.S.R.O. is just seven hundred million dollars, or 0.038 per cent of India’s G.D.P. This year, NASA will spend sixteen and a half billion dollars, around 0.1 per cent of the American G.D.P.
But the payoffs of space programs can justify their expense. While the exact economic impact of R. & D. spending is difficult to quantify, numerous studies over the years have found significant returns, as much as seven or nine times the investment. The benefits are not just monetary: in a press conference on Tuesday, the I.S.R.O. chairman argued that India’s expertise with weather satellites, patiently developed over the years, had enabled predictions precise enough to save thousands of lives during a coastal cyclone the month before. What is impossible to quantify, however, is the ignition of imaginations that attends such successes—the spurt of optimism and confidence that can urge people, even for a brief moment, to lift their eyes upward and aim a little higher.
Samanth Subramanian is the India correspondent for The National.