I like India, visit regularly, & am impressed by their space ambitions.
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I like India, visit regularly, & am impressed by their space ambitions.
But these stories about how amazingly cheap & cost effective their missions are misleading.
For example, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission cost 6.2 billion rupees which translates to an nominally low €68 million.
But the bulk of the cost of a space mission is in personnel & the average aerospace engineer salary in India is ~10% of the European or US equivalent.
Now make the comparison again
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Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan: Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars
India has approved 227bn rupees ($2.7bn) for new space projects - but the funding is far from lavish.
(www.bbc.com)
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Mark McCaughreanreplied to Mark McCaughrean last edited by
To be clear, this isn't a criticism of the Indian space programme – it's a criticism of using irrelevant metrics to compare costs.
The official exchange rate misses the point – you should be comparing the local human resource cost in FTEs of people of developing a space mission & broadly speaking, that's similar between India, Europe, & the US.
And equally broadly, the cost of an FTE is reflected in the actual cost of living in a country, which the exchange rate only partly captures.
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Mark McCaughreanreplied to Mark McCaughrean last edited by
For reference, sites like Glassdoor give an indication of the average salaries for aerospace engineers in India, Europe, & the US, although you need to remember that the Indian counting system uses lakh & crore rather than thousands & millions.
Here's one summary, for example:
Aerospace Engineer Salary in the World for 2024
Explore aerospace engineering salary in India vs. globally. Discover top-paying countries, companies, and best jobs for a high-flying career in aerospace.
LeapScholar (leapscholar.com)
where you can see that the Indian salaries are about 10% of the European & US ones, at the current official exchange rate.
Which again misses the point.
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Mark McCaughreanreplied to Mark McCaughrean last edited by
My personal take is that there are three reasons these stories keep surfacing:
1. Because of lazy journalism.
2. Because it gets clicks when you say a real space mission costs less than a Hollywood sci-fi movie.
3. Because it serves a certain kind of chauvinistic political agenda to say "look how much better / more cost effective we are than those guys".
Again, the achievements of the Indian space programme are amazing – these simplistic cost comparisons just don't do it proper justice.
