India’s first Mars satellite enters orbit, costing just 11% of NASA’s own Mars mission

India’s Mars orbiter, Mangalyaan, has successfully inserted itself into Mars orbit. India becomes only the fourth space agency to successfully make it into Mars orbit, behind the Soviets, NASA, and the ESA. Remarkably, the entirety of India’s Mangalyaan mission cost just 4.5 billion rupees — or about $74 million. Compare this to NASA’s own MAVEN Mars orbiter, which has a total mission cost of around $672 million. This was also India’s first attempt to reach Mars orbit — historically, only Europe’s ESA made it to Mars on its first attempt.

The ISRO — India’s space agency — launched Mangalyaan (literally “Mars-craft”) back in November 2013. In the last 10 months, it has traveled about 680 million kilometers (422 million miles) in a heliocentric orbit around the Sun to finally reach Mars. Funnily enough, NASA’s own MAVEN orbiter reached Mars just a couple of days ago. Both spacecraft useda Hohmann transfer orbit — a special trajectory to Mars that is only available every 26 months — to get there with minimal fuel consumption.

An ISRO PSLV launch — the same rocket that launched Mangalyaan into space in November 2013

Other than the fact that the ISRO succeeded on its first attempt, the most notable aspect of the Mangalyaan mission is its extremely low cost. The orbiter itself cost around $25 million, with the rest of the $74 million budget being consumed by launch services and upgraded ground stations to support the mission (but these upgrades will also aid future ISRO missions, too). Compare this to NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, which cost somewhere in the region of $485 million to develop — and around $187 million for the launch into space and further ground support. This means ISRO’s mission cost around 11% of NASA’s mission.

Obviously a direct comparison isn’t really fair. While Mangalyaan is a tech demo with just 15 kilos (33 lbs) of scientific instruments on board, MAVEN is a full-fat NASA satellite with 65 kilos of scientific goodness. MAVEN itself is a much larger device, too — it had a launch mass of over 2.5 tonnes, while Mangalyaan was only just over a tonne — meaning it needed a much larger (and more expensive) launch vehicle to get into space.

ISRO mission control, following the Mangalyaan mission

Still, even when all of these factors are considered, it’s clear that ISRO’s Mangalyaan is much, much cheaper than anything else that has ever made it to Mars. NASA can certainly cut its costs a little with cheaper, commercial space launchers from the likes of SpaceX — but ultimately, bureaucracy and other forms of red tape are always going to inflate total costs. If you think of India’s ISRO as a nimble Silicon Valley startup, NASA is like Microsoft: A big and lumbering giant that wants to play with the kids — SpaceX — but is ultimately still an agency of the US government with some 20,000 employees.

Moving forward, Mangalyaan will analyze both the atmosphere and surface of Mars with its five scientific instruments. As this was merely a tech demo — to see if India could actually get a spacecraft successfully into Martian orbit — there will now presumably be a bigger and better spacecraft developed in the next few years. India will be fairly chuffed that it got to Mars before China — there’s a fair bit of competition going on between the two countries, and China’s own Yinghuo-1 Mars orbiter failed to get there — but China is probably still ahead overall, considering it has put a human into space; India currently has no definite plans for manned space missions.