India join race for Mars

[HopAlongBunny]

India put a probe in orbit around Mars.
They managed this feat on the first shot; so far the first to get it right the first time.
India also managed to do this bit of space exploration for under $100 million.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2...235943945.html

[Fragony]

The Dutch are a little bit more ambitious, we are going to colonise the https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tgkyUBkbY

Take me to your dealer

[rajpoot]

Yeah people are jumping around with pride and joy about it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy too, but spending a 100 million USD on something like this that is probably little more than a tour de force seems a little excessive considering the number of issues the country is facing on the ground.

[Beskar]

Space Exploration has a very big trickle down effect. The technologies developed and implemented end up featuring in other devices and other technological advances so whilst the initial costs are high, they end up paying themselves off and more in the wider economy and community. So the investment will help those efforts down on the ground by making the nation more prosperous.

[HopAlongBunny]

A graphic compare/contrast MAVEN (US) and MOM (India):

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/int...346339601.html

As one commentator put it ...a Mars mission for less than a Hollywood blockbuster... pretty impressive :)

[a completely inoffensive name]

Very happy for India. The more countries that send space probes out is more knowledge and data back on Earth.

Space exploration is also not in conflict with the idea that there are more important things to take of back home. Space exploration beyond lower Earth orbit has a drastically higher failure rate which increases the further out you go. The fact that India achieved this on the first attempt (look up the number of mars missions that have failed miserably) shows the quality of Indian engineers and signals an advanced ability among other engineering disciplines as well which work on more "down to earth" projects.

[Montmorency]

Space Exploration has a very big trickle down effect. The technologies developed and implemented end up featuring in other devices and other technological advances so whilst the initial costs are high, they end up paying themselves off and more in the wider economy and community. So the investment will help those efforts down on the ground by making the nation more prosperous.

True in principle, but one may question the magnitude of the effect when the overall investment is rather low and/or short-lived.

There may well be tiered thresholds at and beyond which there are large leaps in ROI ratios. The trick then is to optimize between potential ancillary ROI and more direct investments or maintenance in other areas of state remit, most commonly infrastructure and social welfare benefits. In fact, though, one could also argue that similar ancillary effects arise in a similar manner (i.e. tiered thresholds) in such cases as infrastructure or welfare spending, which adds multiple dimensions to the equation.

One big actuarial cluster...

[HopAlongBunny]

First images and write-up:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-first-images/

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...One big actuarial cluster...

Actuaries love nothing better than a tangled pile of data to sift through....you would make them very happy.