India went to Mars for $74M (less than what it cost to make 'Gravity' - $100M)

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UPDATE: India’s satellite entered Mars orbit on Wednesday morning. Read more here.

If India’s Mangalyaan space probe successfully enters an orbit around Mars on Wednesday, the country will have made history – twice.

It will be the only nation so far to reach Mars on its first attempt. It will also have spent the least amount of money to do so.

India’s Mars mission has a price tag of about $74 million, a fraction of the $671 million cost of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s latest Mars program.

A success would be an important advertisement for a business India hopes to enter: sending satellites and spacecraft aloft at a fraction of the cost of U.S. and European competitors.

In June, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted that India has spent less to reach Mars than Hollywood producers spent on the movie “Gravity,” which cost $100 million to make.

To hold costs down, India relied on technologies it has used before and kept the size of the payload small, at 15 kilograms. It saved on fuel by using a smaller rocket to put its spacecraft into Earth orbit first to gain enough momentum to slingshot it toward Mars.

“India has cheap indigenous technology,” said Ajey Lele, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a New Delhi think-tank. He said cost-saving innovations “came out of sheer necessity.”

The Indian Space Research Organization has always operated on a shoe-string budget. In its early days, space scientists worked out of an abandoned church near its first launch pad.

Later, after India carried out nuclear-weapons tests, other countries refused to share their technical know-how, limiting India’s access to sophisticated technology. “India had no option but to develop its own,” said Mr. Lele.

Today, India spends $1.2 billion a year on its space program. In comparison, NASA has a budget of $17.5 billion for the year ending Sept. 30.

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