The celebration of Isro’s grand thrift auto mode is highly justified. After all, it was perceived profligacy that shut down the original moon missions that started with the Soviet Luna program – Luna 9 being the first craft to achieve a soft landing on any celestial body (moon) in February 1966. Even here on Earth, the Concorde’s suicidal operating costs (in today’s money, over $2.55 billion a year towards the end) saw the Franco-British supersonic airliner shut shop in 2003.
So, yes, price matters. Very much. And that Isro’s Chandrayaan-3 mission was successfully conducted at the cost of ₹615 crore – significantly less than the ₹1,600 crore spent on Russia’s Luna-25 mission that failed this week, or even the ₹1,450 crore spent on China’s Chang’e-5 ‘return with lunar samples’ successful mission in 2020 – is frabjous.
But, and here’s my concern, let’s not fetishise budget-cutting and make a sport of ‘fitting more family members on the bike’. The risk of jai ho-ing cutting corners can become real.
A Google search for ‘Interstellar budget’ has now become a conduit for renewed desi pride. By comparing Isro’s Chandrayaan-3 spend of about $75 million with the $165 million budget of Christopher Nolan’s 2014 science fiction film, Interstellar, at best, you’re comparing (expensive) apples to (cheap) caviar. At worst, you’re cheerleading a model where cost is not an important factor, but is the only factor. Adipurush is getting trolled for its ₹600 crore budget. But that Om Raut mythological should be trolled regardless of whether it had been funded by a week of your daughter’s school lunch allowance, or by the GDP of a small west European country.
Isro’s financially canny ‘cost-cutting’ has been about smart housekeeping. This includes taking the ‘slow and steady’ longer route using gravitational ‘slingshot’ forces to expend less rocket fuel; keeping the payload low; and recycling certain earlier mission components and data, rather than start from scratch other space organisations. According to former Isro chairman G Madhavan Nair, some 30% of the subsystems used in Chandrayaan-1 in 2008 were used in earlier operations, including its PSLV-XL C11 launch vehicle that used additional enhanced strap-on motors. And, of course, Isro’s celebrated heroes come cheap. According to Nair, wages of scientists, technicians, and other Isro staff are ‘hardly one-fifth of what is given globally’. So, the Chandrayaan-3 budget vs Elon Musk’s Twitter/X office refurbishing bill, or Chandrayaan-3 vs Neymar’s Al Hilal annual salary isn’t very helpful. For one, it underplays the fact that we’re talking about Chandrayaan-3 because it has been successful. No one talks about the chap who comes fourth in class ‘ooh! by studying only two hours a day!’ They talk about the guy who comes first. The fact whether he studies for 1 hour or 23 hours becomes important only by the fact that he first came, well, first.
For another, movies having gigantic budgets is something they flaunt. Apart from Elizabeth Taylor’s Sadhana cut, Cleopatra is today remembered not as the biggest Hollywood movie of its time to lose tankloads of money – it almost destroyed the studio system – but as the ‘most expensive film to be made’ of its time. The reason the Tata Nano didn’t work was not because it wasn’t cheap enough to make and sell, but because no one, not even those looking for cars in the ₹1 lakh range, wanted to tomtom the fact that they wished to own a cheap car.
With Chandrayaan-3, its ‘cheapness’ is part of its smartness. Not the other way around, as many a jugaad-evangelist would have us believe.
