India Enters Mars Orbit
India’s Mars Orbiter Spacecraft Enters Mars Orbit (with video)
“India successfully placed its Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft into orbit around Mars this evening – and in so doing it became the first nation to put something into Mars orbit on its very first attempt.”
Result!
This is very impressive. Dunno how many people today remember or realize how much Mars likes to eat missions.
Congratulations, India!
I’m really enjoying the webcast. It’s this great combination of science, politics, culture, and the sheer joy of accomplishment. Well done, ISRO!
Congratulations to India. I wonder how soon until Elon and SpaceX fund and send a probe to Mars?
I expect that they will allow others to collect data on Mars for as long as they can. If it comes to the point that they need some information for the colonization plans that has not been made available by the research missions of others, then it makes sense for them to start expending resources on gathering the data themselves.
“FUND and send” – ?? not in the next 25 years. SpaceX is in the business of making money – don’t let the talk, which is cheap, confuse you. You may have observed that they have made no progress putting people into LEO, without government funding. There’s no money to be made at Mars (yet), apart from building hardware for government missions.
SpaceX is an exciting company that’s done some great things, but the Elon hagiography on RIFWatch is a bit extreme.
CONGRATULATIONS ISRO!!
So happy for them….a lot of very hard work on a shoestring budget really paid off. Can’t wait to see their follow-on mission.
Good luck to them. It’s good to have a new player in the interplanetary probe game.
I’m not sure that some of the cost comparisons in the news today between MOM and MAVEN are entirely fair given the differing science payloads though. I also wonder how much of the cost difference is due to accounting techniques.
And microscopic salaries and rockets who’s cost is buried, and essentially using flight hardware off the shelf from another mission.
The salaries for aerospace engineers in India is less than 1/5 of US salaries.
If you carry that ratio across all jobs, blue and white collar, and material costs, then normalized, the flight cost $375 million.
Looked at another way, considered as a percentage of GDP per person US vs India, the flight cost $2 billion dollars.
It’s a wonderful start for India.
Damn impressive…we all know how tough Mars is.
“became the first nation to put something into Mars orbit on its very first attempt”
My dad used to say “horse manure makes the roses grow”.
As to being the first, I think ESA would beg to differ.
Mars Express
I guess ESA is disqualified because it is a consortium.
Well done MOM! Welcome to the family of active missions at Mars!