Frugal Mars mission launches India into global space market

NEW DELHI (AFP) ― India’s bid to become the first Asian nation to reach Mars sets a new benchmark for frugal interplanetary travel and puts it in a perfect position to grab more of the $300 billion global space market, experts say.

“Everyone wants to do low-cost missions nowadays,” Indian science author Pallava Bagla told AFP, adding, “Don’t underestimate it because it is a low-cost mission.”

The Indian Space Research Organization ― ISRO ― staged a flawless launch last Tuesday of its Mars-bound spacecraft, loaded with a camera, an imaging spectrometer and a methane sensor to probe for life on the red planet.

The mission’s price, a record low $73 million, “has been an eye-opener of sorts” for the world, Susmita Mohanty, co-founder and chief executive of Mumbai’s Earth2Orbit, India’s first private space enterprise start-up, told AFP.

That is not only because of the mission’s meager price when compared to its U.S. counterpart, NASA’s Maven, due to launch Nov. 18 and costing 10 times as much but also because “the world was largely ignorant about the advanced nature of India’s space program,” Mohanty said.

India already ranks among the top six space-faring nations in technological capabilities ― the others being the U.S., Russia, China, France and Japan, Mohanty said.