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.
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:
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.
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.
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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India has approved 227bn rupees ($2.7bn) for new space projects - but the funding is far from lavish.
(www.bbc.com)
Hey, photography folk – I need your help.
I have an Adobe Photography Plan subscription for LR & PS. It's connected to my Dutch credit card & I want to switch it to my German one.
The insane solution from Adobe support is:
1. Download all my images synced to their cloud (>200GB);
2. Delete my account & open a new one with a new email address;
3. Change back to the old email address;
4. Resync all my photos back to the cloud.
Am in support chat hell with this madness.
Utterly bananas. Ha
Thankfully, even the dullest of grey cycling skies can be fixed with a few sliders in LightRoom 🤪
A hallucinogenic take on the metal structure of the Landungssteg in Ladenburg overlooking the Neckar river, as seen on today’s 46km ride.
#OTD eight years ago, I awoke in Sydney long before sunrise, heavily jet-lagged after flying from Europe via Singapore
Meaning this picture could be taken 
The next fortnight included stops in several packed Aussie stadiums & the prime minister’s office in the company of a rather famous man, a volcanic hike in New Zealand & consoling distraught Americans, & a drive across the Atacama desert in Chile between three epic observatory sites 
More memories to follow … 
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It’s all looking very Spielbergian outside tonight
Speaking of comets, it would be very remiss of me not to mark the tenth anniversary of the premiere "Ambition".
It's a short sci-fi film we made with our friends at Platige Image in Poland, leading up to the deployment of Philae by ESA's Rosetta mission on 12 November 2014, to land on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Perhaps one of the maddest things I've ever done in science communications, & something I remain deeply proud of.
Links below with some of the back story.
1/
FWIW, I think I first heard Stefan talking about the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation tipping point more than 20 yrs ago when I was working in Potsdam.
It scared me then & the scientific evidence for it, our understanding of the dangers it poses, & the risk that it’ll happen soon have all increased since.
As he says, the main danger is that our agricultural systems, our infrastructure, & dare I say it, our politics are predicated on things staying the same.
Which they will not.
“I don’t think it is my job to talk about my feelings, but I do have two children and I am very worried about what future they will live in. I sometimes joke that physicists don’t have feelings. But even physicists care about their kids.”
Important reminder from @rahmstorf that the #climatecrisis is a human & personal nightmare, not just remote “science”.
Part of this must-read piece about the Amoc & the catastrophe it will unleash if it collapses:
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Before I dig into the DSLR photos, some more pictures of my vantage point this evening for viewing Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS ️
I was atop the 41m Teltschikturm, itself atop the 529m Schriesheimer Kopf, so 570m / 1850 feet in total 
Vaguely terrifying: wind howling through the structure, no-one else there, & dark forest below – imagine what it'd be like if it wasn't full Moon 
Nice views though
#Comet2023a3 #Comet #Photography #Halloween #Heidelberg #Odenwald
Sign of the times.
There are lots of timelapses of the lovely Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS on the net ️
But watch a few & you’ll quickly notice many have huge numbers of passing satellites in them, often in similar orbits 
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It doesn’t take a genius to realise that most of these belong to one guy who’s commandeering the public commons to further enrich himself.
Screenshot credit: fernanfegal @ Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAl5QWMSLBR/?igsh=bm9qc2l3cmphMTM1
